Articles By
Mykola Makhortykh
Stochastic lies: How LLM-powered chatbots deal with Russian disinformation about the war in Ukraine
Mykola Makhortykh, Maryna Sydorova, Ani Baghumyan, Victoria Vziatysheva and Elizaveta Kuznetsova
Research on digital misinformation has turned its attention to large language models (LLMs) and their handling of sensitive political topics. Through an AI audit, we analyze how three LLM-powered chatbots (Perplexity, Google Bard, and Bing Chat) generate content in response to the prompts linked to common Russian disinformation narratives about the war in Ukraine.
A story of (non)compliance, bias, and conspiracies: How Google and Yandex represented Smart Voting during the 2021 parliamentary elections in Russia
Mykola Makhortykh, Aleksandra Urman and Mariëlle Wijermars
On 3 September 2021, the Russian court forbade Google and Yandex to display search results for “Smart Voting,” the query referring to a tactical voting project by the jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny. To examine whether the two search engines complied with the court order, we collected top search outputs for the query from Google and Yandex.
COVID-19
How search engines disseminate information about COVID-19 and why they should do better
Mykola Makhortykh, Aleksandra Urman and Roberto Ulloa
Access to accurate and up-to-date information is essential for individual and collective decision making, especially at times of emergency. On February 26, 2020, two weeks before the World Health Organization (WHO) officially declared the COVID-19’s emergency a “pandemic,” we systematically collected and analyzed search results for the term “coronavirus” in three languages from six search engines. We