RBC caught officials cheating Yandex.News for Sobyanin

The RBC business portal published an investigation into the situation with 200 government-related media outlets that were connected to the Yandex.News aggregator in September. According to RBC, in this way the mayor's office has learned to adapt to the search engine algorithms, bringing stories about Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin to the top news on the main page of Yandex.

Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin

As it turned out, most of the sites publishing news about the Moscow government appeared on the Internet in 2014. At the same time, the paper newspapers themselves, on the basis of which online publications were created, existed for years and decades.

The publications were opened in a hurry: one of the sources in the circles of the creators of such sites states that a week was allotted to fulfill the order. The portal’s interlocutor at one of the publishing companies complained that the pace and volume of work only increased after the elections to the Moscow City Duma. If previously it took 2.5 hours to write a note on a source, now this time has been reduced to 40 minutes.

According to the source, the news is sent from the Moscow Information Technologies organization, an organization that provides media support to the Moscow City Hall. The name MIT appeared in a leak from the Anonymous International, which spoke of systematic work commissioned by political “jeans” in a whole series of well-known Russian online publications.

Having collected a total of about two hundred publications in its own, the mayor’s office has learned to manipulate the algorithms of Yandex.News, RBC concludes. The aggregator is designed in such a way that it displays only important stories on the main page, and the importance of the story is determined by the number of news, the weight of publications and the intensity of the appearance of new materials.

Sometimes the appearance of news in the top was facilitated by the participation in the story of one or more large media outlets with a high weight, important for the algorithm. At the same time, the news stories were not resonant enough to be so in demand on their own.

Thus, the “army” of local online publications brought the necessary news to the main page of the search engine, which has huge traffic, in a few minutes. According to official data from Yandex, about 48 million people visit the yandex.ru page every month. The Yandex.News project is visited by about 22 million people a month.

It was not possible to obtain any comments from representatives of the official bodies of RBC: Deputy Mayor of Moscow for Information Policy Alexander Gorbenko, head of the press service of the mayor's office Gulnara Penkova and General Director of MIT Alexander Shelukhin did not respond to the publication's requests.

For the first time, information about connecting a huge number of Moscow publications to Yandex.News was announced by the mayor’s office on September 22. Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin and Yandex General Director Arkady Volozh personally agreed on such cooperation, which also included interaction on navigation projects, including the creation by Yandex of a car parking application.

The ambiguous position of Yandex in the eyes of the Russian authorities worsened after Vladimir Putin’s speech at the ONF forum in April. After the president’s words about foreign influence in the Russian search engine, parliament became interested in the activities of Yandex. LDPR deputy Andrei Lugovoy proposed in May to register Yandex as a media outlet due to its high influence (none of the other Russian online publications and news portals have such traffic), but a month and a half later, the Prosecutor General’s Office found no reason for this.

According to two RBC sources in the presidential administration and the leadership of the State Duma, the topic of holding Yandex accountable and regulating legislation around search engines is no longer relevant. A source at one of the Internet companies suggested that the authorities calmed down after they found a way to influence how Yandex displays news.

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