International Journal of Press-Politics
Yandex’s Top-5 News as a Tool of Russia’s Propaganda Abroad: A Case Study of Belarus
2025-07-03
Prior research has demonstrated that the algorithms of the Kremlin-controlled search engine Yandex are biased toward the interests of Russia’s ruling elites. However, it has focused primarily on Yandex’s web and news search algorithms and largely neglected Yandex’s popular top-5 news recommender algorithm. Therefore, this study investigates the role of news embedded on Yandex’s homepage—on the side to its search functionality—in disseminating Russia’s propaganda to foreign audiences and tracks its evolution over time. To do so, I audited Yandex’s top-5 news algorithm in Belarus from 2010 to 2022. By analyzing 474,663 news headlines from Yandex’s homepage ( yandex.by ) in Belarus, I found that (1) on a monthly average, the majority (52.2%) of Yandex’s top-5 news in Belarus came from sources with explicit connections to Russia’s ruling elites, and (2) a substantial portion of the news was political, with the share of political news increasing over time. In addition, Yandex in Belarus (3) frequently featured news about Russia or Russian actors, which appeared almost exclusively in the default domestic top news section for Belarus as opposed to the top news happening in the world, and (4) experienced a notable decline in the presence of Kremlin-critical news sources, marked by the complete disappearance of Western and Russian opposition websites in late 2018–2019 and the disappearance of Belarusian opposition websites shortly after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. These findings demonstrate the gradual political appropriation of Yandex’s top-5 news algorithms by Russia’s ruling elites, marking Yandex as a propaganda tool of the Kremlin.