Since coming to power in 2015, Poland’s Law and Justice (PiS) party has eroded media freedom and pluralism, taking over public media and hindering independent outlets. While PiS’s control of the information environment via television, radio, and print is well documented, it has been unknown whether state-backed media and state-friendly narratives similarly dominate search engines. This research project sought to answer this question by analyzing search results related to key issues surrounding Poland’s 2023 parliamentary election—the country’s most consequential and contested election since the fall of communism—on three of the most used search products in Poland: Google, Microsoft’s Bing, and Yandex Search. Given Yandex’s Russian ties, it was analyzed separately. (See “Yandex and measuring foreign influence”). As such, unless otherwise noted, the analysis in this report is applicable to Bing, Bing News, Google, and Google News only. To analyze these services, the Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD) at the German Marshall Fund tracked approximately 50 queries related to prominent election issues on the three studied search products and five search services (Google News and Bing News were evaluated independently of their search equivalents) and analyzed whether they pointed users predominantly towards media outlets controlled or captured by the Polish government. We tracked the terms daily for 17 days up to and including October 15, 2023.
