Axel Bruns Interviewed on QUT’s Real World News
21 July 2021
Speakers:
Ella Holding-McGrath, Journalist, QUT Real World News
Prof Axel Bruns, QUT node, ADM+S
Watch the recording
Duration: 0:07:25

Ella Holding-McGrath: 

Hello, and welcome to Real World News. My name is Ella Holding-McGrath, and our guest today is QUT Professor Axel Bruns. Dr Bruns is an Australian media scholar and a researcher inside the Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision Making and Society. He was also recently awarded the Australian laureate fellowship, one of the nation’s highest honours.

Today Dr Bruns joins us to talk about his latest project, something called the Australian Search Experience. Welcome Dr Bruns.

Prof Axel Bruns: 

Thank you.

Ella Holding-McGrath: 

Can you tell us a little bit more about the project?

Prof Axel Bruns: 

Absolutely. And what we’re trying to do is to find out what difference there is in the search results that Australian users see. Search engines are of course, really critical to our lives today. We inform ourselves via various search engines whether it’s Google or others, and these sorts of recommendation systems are built into everything from social media platforms as well, you know Youtube and other platforms too. So what we’re trying to find out really, is when people search for particular topics what do they see? How much variation is there in what they see? As well, how much difference is there if you and i are searching for a particular topic, do we see the same things or not? Now some variation might be useful and of course we know that search engines end up personalizing the information that they provide to a certain extent, so based on our different interests we might see different results, but for some topics that can be really, really problematic. Of course if we’re both searching for vaccine information, let’s say then of course we need to have the right information independent of who we are. If you get information saying you should vaccinate, I get information saying i shouldn’t, then there’s a problem and it might really undermine society overall. Ultimately, and the same goes for other important topics of course as well. So really what we’re trying to find out with this project is what kind of information do people see when they search? How is that different across different parts of the population? How does it perhaps change over time, as well as new information comes to hand? And the only way for us to be able to do that is to do it from the outside, by essentially enlisting as many Australians to help us as possible. So this is a what we call a data donation project. It’s essentially enrolling Australian users as citizen scientists. So we’re asking people to install a simple browser plugin that from time to time will run particular searches, particular search topics, and report back to us the results that it sees. We’re not trying to get into anyone’s personal browser histories, we’re not trying to access any private information from their computers. We’re simply saying can we have a few moments of your computer’s time basically to run a search in your browser and report back the results that you would see if you were running that search. And then we put all of that together and across the, hopefully thousands of users that will have installing this plugin- will be able to see you know, what differences there might be across participants. Whether that’s by age, by gender, by location, by other factors. You know, how different or how similar the results are that we’re seeing from this effort?

Ella Holding-McGrath: 

So there are two primary concerns about the project and that’s privacy and cost. Could you elaborate on those concerns a little.

Prof Axel Bruns: 

Absolutely. So what we ask people to do is to install a simple browser plug-in into on their web browsers, in the same way that you would install an ad blocker or other types of plugins in your browser. What that plugin does is simply run searches from time to time. It will pop up a new browser window it will run a few searches that we’ve got queued up for generic search topics. So it will not at any point access people’s personal browser histories. It will not access any kind of private data. All that we’re asking is essentially for a little bit of time from users to be donated on their machines. So basically a window just pops up very much out of the way not interrupting anyone, just doing a few searches and reporting the results back and it doesn’t cost anything of course. We’re simply asking people to donate a little bit of their computer time to this research.

Ella Holding-McGrath: 

Yeah, hopefully that can ease some of the concerns then. If I wanted to, how could i download the algorithm?

Prof Axel Bruns: 

It’s a simple browser plugin, so if you go to our website you can click on a button that will install the plugin that gets you to the chrome of Firefox extension store and installs the plugin. Then you click through the consent form so obviously all of this has been approved by our ethics committee as well, so you provide your consent for the plugin to run. You can provide some basic demographic information if you choose to, but you don’t have to and then the plugin is installed and it basically will run, it will pop up every few hours with a window that runs a few searches and that’s all that you really will see. You can uninstall it of course at any time, or you can pause it if it just is disruptive at some point as well.

Ella Holding-McGrath: 

Okay yeah, that’s really good. When do you hope to complete the study by?

Prof Axel Bruns: 

We’re planning for this to run for a year in power to be able to capture events coming up as well. There’s a federal election coming up of course, and we’re interested to see what search results people might see during that time as well. But people can also stop the plugin at any point if they feel that they’ve done enough, they’ve donated enough data. So if you sign up if you install the plugin you don’t have to keep running it for 12 months, if you don’t want to.

Ella Holding-McGrath: 

Okay, is there anything else you’d like to add?

Prof Axel Bruns: 

Look, this is a really important project, and we’re really essentially asking people to be what we call citizen scientists. So in the same way that you know, you might have people reporting the weather in their local areas or these sorts of things, really what we’re trying to do here is to encourage as many people as possible in Australia to help us understand what search results they are seeing and what difference there is between the different search results that people are seeing. This is really the only way to understand and to create more transparency around search engines, because of course Google and other platforms aren’t going to provide the internal workings of their platforms to us, so what we’re really trying to do is to get as many people as possible to help us understand better the impact that these search engines have on society.

Ella Holding-McGrath: 

Thank you so much for joining us today, Dr Bruns. That’s some really important information for everyone to know. It’s some really important research that you’re doing. Thank you. My name is Ella Holding-McGrath and this is Real World News. See you next time.