Devin Nunes and the Power of Keyword Signaling

On September 26, the House Intelligence Committee held a hearing to investigate a whistle-blower complaint against President Donald Trump. In Congressman Devin Nunes’ opening remarks, he argued that this was just another example of news media and Democratic “information warfare” spreading “hoaxes” that delegitimize the president. His argument was similar to his remarks during a June 12 House Intelligence Committee hearing, where he referred to the Mueller Report as a “shoddy political hit piece” created through a “perfect feedback loop” between intelligence leakers, key intelligence figures, Democrats, and the media who perpetuate “fake outrage.” These remarks do more than assert his position. A careful analysis reveals how strategic keyword signaling amplifies conservative agendas in the contemporary news environment.

We increasingly turn to search engines to seek out information. Since Google’s earliest days, marketers have relied on “search engine optimization” to try to maximize the likelihood that Google returns content that highlights their cause or company. In today’s media landscape, organizations and individuals also use these tactics to manipulate the algorithms behind Facebook/Instagram and Twitter feeds. The problem is, whether or not we’re aware, the key words we search are coded with political biases. My research demonstrates that it’s possible to position ideological searches to maximize the exposure of their content.

When there is limited or no content available on a topic, it’s possible to game search engines to guarantee that certain keywords will be directed to content that includes these terms or is tagged accordingly. This is why conspiracy theorists were able to capitalize on the concept of a “crisis actor.” By producing a plethora of insidious content rife with the term and maximizing SEO, conspiracy theorists filled what Microsoft’s Michael Golebiewski and danah boyd referred to as a “data void.” Searches for “crisis actor” got conspiratorial results until other sources filled the void with more legitimate content debunking the theory.

To demonstrate how this works in politics, I Googled a few key phrases used in both of Nunes’ speeches. The results demonstrate how politicians and pundits can exploit data voids to create ideological information silos. During each hearing, Nunes describes “the Russia collusion hoax.” When you search for “collusion hoax,” the links returned support the position that investigations into the president are bogus. The top links are from a story in The New York Post published just last week that Dems are trying to block Barr’s probe into the “Russian collusion hoax” and a link to Amazon to purchase a book titled The Russia Hoax: The Illicit Scheme to Clear Hillary Clinton and Frame Donald Trump, by Fox News legal analyst Gregg Jarrett.

Strategic signaling also drew attention to what the Mueller report did not focus on. On June 12, Nunes noted that the report had not procured any “useful information on figures who played key roles in the investigation such as Joseph Mifsud,” a Maltese academic and figure in the George Papadopoulos case, “or the Democrat paid operative, former spy Christopher Steele,” the British intelligence officer behind the now notorious pee tape allegations. In the days following Nunes’ remarks, the search returns were primarily conservative content published anywhere between two weeks to 12 minutes before Nunes’ speech. In addition to traditional conservative sources like Fox News, Washington Examiner, and National Review, there are also digital-first sources like the Daily Caller and the Daily Wire, as well as stories posted from more dubious publications like the Epoch Times.

In his most recent hearing Nunes mentions Nellie Ohr, the wife of former high-ranking Justice official Bruce Ohr. As I’ve detailed in previous writing and in my testimony before the Senate, when you search Nellie Ohr online, her name exists in an ideological vacuum, because only conservative media producers consider her a newsworthy topic. In his June 12 remarks Nunes argues that not only did the report prove false, it failed to investigate links between Democrat operatives at Fusion GPS and Russians, “in fact no comment on Fusion GPS at all.” On September 26, Nunes furthered this conspiracy telling Congress that “Serhiy Leshchenko was a source for Nellie Ohr, wife of Department of Justice official Bruce Orh, as she worked on the anti-Trump operation conducted by Fusion GPS and funded by the Democrats.” When you Google “Serhiy Leshchenko Nellie Ohr,” the top news stories are by the Daily Caller, a right-wing news and opinion website founded by Fox News host Tucker Carlson and Neil Patel, and the Epoch Times. A simple search for “fusion gps” or “Nellie Ohr” leads users down a rabbit hole of allegations, misinformation, and QAnon conspiracy theories. These findings are not exclusive to Google. When you enter in the names of “Joseph Mifsud,” “Nellie Ohr,” or “Christopher Steele” into DuckDuckGo, the information returned is also primarily from conservative sources.

These findings reveal that existing studies on algorithms, filter bubbles, and misinformation online are missing a crucial component regarding the problem of political polarization, specifically data focused on how we access news and information. Epistemological frameworks can lead us into algorithmic rabbit holes. Understanding keyword signaling is an essential part of studying political polarization. While most focus on how output (e.g., search results or social media newsfeeds) keeps us in filter bubbles, more research is needed on how inputs are manipulated for political gain. This level of sophistication highlights how conservative groups systematically work to optimize their content for search and social media. Not unlike the tactics of Republican strategist Frank Luntz, political players and members of the right-wing media ecosystem are able to fill data voids with their own ideas and stories.

One of the central concerns raised by conservative pundits and Republican representatives is that “the media” (including search engines like Google) paint conservatives negatively and liberal interests favorably. In both of Nunes’ opening remarks, he indicates that Democrats are in cahoots with the media, in order to drive the national conversation to fit their agenda. But we don’t live in a world where the news media is confined to any one source. Much like Marshall McLuhan argued decades earlier, “the medium is the message.” We can’t understand the full extent of political polarization unless we consider how news production and dissemination influence the scale and pace of how we access information. This is why the temporal structure of search is so important to consider when it comes to conversations about filter bubbles. Once Barr began probing Josef Mifsud and other sources began investigating the story, a more diverse set of sources are returned in search, but until that point, only conservative stories had been written about the political figure. As my work routinely demonstrates, our contemporary news environment is easily manipulable. Strategic signaling is just one of the many ways producers can create parallel internets entrenched in propaganda.