Digital Gatekeeping: An Audit of Search Engine Results shows tailoring of queries on the Israel-Palestine Conflict

Search engines, often viewed as reliable gateways to information, tailor search results using customization algorithms based on user preferences, location, and more. While this can be useful for routine queries, it raises concerns when the topics are sensitive or contentious, possibly limiting exposure to diverse viewpoints and increasing polarization. To examine the extent of this tailoring, we focused on the Israel-Palestine conflict and developed a privacy-protecting tool to audit the behavior of three search engines: DuckDuckGo, Google and Yahoo. Our study focused on two main questions: (1) How do search results for the same query about the conflict vary among different users? and (2) Are these results influenced by the user's location and browsing history? Our findings revealed significant customization based on location and browsing preferences, unlike previous studies that found only mild personalization for general topics. Moreover, queries related to the conflict were more customized than unrelated queries, and the results were not neutral concerning the conflict's portrayal.

PTPARL-D: Annotated Corpus of 44 years of Portuguese Parliament debates

In a representative democracy, some decide in the name of the rest, and these elected officials are commonly gathered in public assemblies, such as parliaments, where they discuss policies, legislate, and vote on fundamental initiatives. A core aspect of such democratic processes are the plenary debates, where important public discussions take place. Many parliaments around the world are increasingly keeping the transcripts of such debates, and other parliamentary data, in digital formats accessible to the public, increasing transparency and accountability. Furthermore, some parliaments are bringing old paper transcripts to semi-structured digital formats. However, these records are often only provided as raw text or even as images, with little to no annotation, and inconsistent formats, making them difficult to analyze and study, reducing both transparency and public reach. Here, we present PTPARL-D, an annotated corpus of debates in the Portuguese Parliament, from 1976 to 2019, covering the entire period of Portuguese democracy.