Combating Misinformation On Google During Ohio’s Fight for Abortion Rights with Britt Bischoff | Hello Merge Tag Ep. 13

“We deployed a competitive search strategy to disrupt pathways to misinformation and lead people to our fact-based narratives instead.”

Britt Bischoff is a reformed corporate digital strategist, analyst, click baiter, and algorithm chaser.

Over her career, she’s led digital strategy and data-informed campaigns for national brands, social causes, and progressive campaigns as a proponent for change in the digital space for the progressive world.

She now serves as the Strategic Growth Advisor at Red Wine & Blue. Her work is in the intersection of data, narrative strategies, and digital impact.

Over the course of her career, she’s worked alongside, and learned from, master search experts and Google’s Web Quality & Spam Team, honing her skills in combating spam and misinformation.

This past year, she put everything she has learned to good use as she worked to develop a strategy to help dispel misinformation in the campaign to protect Ohioan’s right to choose with Issue 1.

Britt led a comprehensive campaign to help remove and combat misinformation on Google Search.

She and her team took on a blog post from an elected official that was spreading rampant disinformation and was rapidly gaining prominence through the featured snippet from Google organic search. Their intervention prevented an estimated 460K+ search exposures.

Britt walked us through how they approached this complicated and important campaign and how they fought back… and ultimately won!… guaranteeing Ohioans the right to choose.

We talked about data voids, nudging tactics, the power (and therefore the danger) of search snippets, intentional misinformation, the role of bad government actors and a whole lot more.

This is scary stuff. But the good news — Britt and her team’s efforts were successful! And they created a path forward for others looking to combat misinformation through search in the future.

Find all episodes at HelloMergeTag.com or wherever you stream podcasts.

Resources, Links and More

• Britt’s LinkedIn
• Case study: Impact of YouTube Video Ads on Search Behavior
• Case study: Defeating State Owned Disinformation in Organic Search
• AI data mining case study
• Disrupting Disinfo on Ohio’s Issue 1 campaign summary
• Can “Googling” correct misbelief? Cognitive and affective consequences of online search
• Investigating the Influence of Featured Snippets on User Attitudes
• Google Search and the creation of ignorance: The case of the climate crisis
• 72% of Americans relied on Google to research political topics in 2020 Britt Bischoff
• 70% of persuadable voters used search engines to decide their votes in the 2022 midterms
• “Nudging” strategies can have a backfire effect
• American’s Trust in Google and Big Tech 
• Hello Merge Tag episode 2: Using Digital Communities to Move Beyond the Transactional with Myles Bugbee
• Hello Merge Tag episode 3: A Deep Dive Into Campaign Websites with Candy Phelps
• Deepak Puri’s podcast tracker and Democracy Labs