This is the second draft of a twitter thread that highlights an interesting connection between search engine optimization and disinformation that I think merits further investigation. 1/10

Yesterday, Trump posted a propaganda film to his Twitter feed, which makes wild accusations about mainstream American institutions being controlled by the Chinese government. 2/10 https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1341948764068704256

The video says that mainstream search engines are subject to manipulation by the Chinese. The video recommends that viewers try @DuckDuckGo instead, where they will see the real truth, and compare results and see for themselves. 3/10

Before I continue with the thread I should be clear that I don't think @DuckDuckGo has done anything wrong here at all. 4/10

However, some DDG searches do seem to produce results with a right wing slant. Search for "election fraud" and most of the results come from right wing sources: 5/10 https://duckduckgo.com/?q=election+fraud

The first page of DDG results for "election" includes one Twitter feed - for Wizard_Predicts, a right wing election news feed that wants you to follow it on Parler. 6/10 https://duckduckgo.com/?q=election 

DuckDuckGo gets many of its results from @Bing. These two result sets map to @Bing's results for the same searches. Bing results are more customized than DDG, but the Twitter feed for the "Election Wizard" appears on the second page of "election" results on Bing for me. 7/10

My intuition is that something isn't right with these results. The "Election Wizard" is not more widely followed or linked than, say, Nate Silver, or other sources of election information on Twitter. Why is @Bing surfacing THAT link first? 8/10

My hypothesis is that right wing pundits have come up with a set of SEO techniques that allow them to game Bing's algorithms so their pages get boosted. I don't have enough information to be sure and I'm open to alternative explanations. 9/10

They are then using the differences in search results to convince their followers that, in fact, it is the ungamed results that are being manipulated by someone with an agenda. 10/10