It seems like a popular response for this kind of this research is “Well of course - I expected this result” or to point out the murky causality going on when an intelligent technology is trained on the behavior of people using it.

I agree this murky causality is important to discuss and that indeed these results are consistent with other observed distributions of online content (i.e. Pareto/Zipf), but I think excessively focusing on these responses undermines the importance of audit research like this. Audit research is mainly descriptive by design (can’t really conduct an experiment unless you’re Google) and without the descriptive results from audit research we can’t argue empirically about the these topics at all!