DuckDuckGo “down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation” | Hacker News Reader

DuckDuckGo “down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation”

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574 pointsthallium205831 comments

I guess this did not age well:

“[W]hen you search, you expect unbiased results, but that’s not what you get on Google,” @matthewde_silva quotes @yegg

https://twitter.com/DuckDuckGo/status/1114524914227253249

Also, they probably do not realize that they will have to start with Twitter if to be consistent.

What does down-ranking disinformation sites globally have to do with complaining about Google customizing results based on its profile of you?

EDIT: The rest of the quote is “On Google, you get results tailored to what they think you’re likely to click on, based on the data profile they’ve built on you over time.”

And in this specific case, it feels more like quality control of state-sponsored spam.

You can still find these sites—they come up first if you look for them directly, they're just treated as the low quality information than they are.

And why should anyone believe that State sponsored spam doesn't come from all angles? If I'm going to receive propaganda, I at least would like consistent sampling of it. And who cares about any of that - you have admonished an information search provider to determine what information it serves you based on subjective, undisclosed criteria of which there is good reason to believe is ideologically motivated.

Some people consume information from outlets like Al Jazeera because they would like something which might be a little more distanced from the West than things like Anglo outlets.

Right, but Al Jazeera is more like the BBC than it is like RT. I don't see anyone making a quality-based argument to downrank it, and I would disagree with them if they did.

Aljazeera is literally the Qatari state media. That means they are the media outlet of a slave state controlled by an absolute monarchy . Tell anyone in the Arabic world that aljazeera is neutral or BBC like and you will get laughed at. Even RT is probably not on as short of an editorial leash than al jazeera.

Your comment is actually an amazing example of why we should absolutely avoid media censorship (like the EU is doing right now); it seems like the people who are usually the most vocally pushing for it are also, not coincidentally, those who are also the most likely to be completely oblivious to propaganda even when it's right in front of them. Yet also think that they are impervious to it.

The BBC is literally the UK state media.

You ignored the "slave state with an absolute monarchy" part I think. Not like they are even comparable, unless you are saying the BBC journalists could justifiably be fearing for their lives if they criticize the UK government? All state media aren't created equal, and aren't equally independant. Otherwise the BBC, aljazeera and RT would be all equal since they are all state media after all.

Have you remembered to renew your BBC license this year?

I'm not British but I still think a license based financing is still probably better than financing from the ruling family of a slave petrostate.

You stated that you aren't British. You should probably ask some Brits what they think about the BBC and understand their criticisms. You may be surprised by the response.

They generally do not consider it unbiased at all and many would call it false propaganda, especially if they are Irish or Scottish.

I am British. The BBC is the best media service in existence, and although one must watch with open eyes (like any media), it is generally more free of bias than any other available source, especially when covering international matters.

If there were an option to pay the license fee from the US, I would.

I can’t decide your generalizations are pretty ignorant (at best parroting the Daily Mail and friends) or malevolent.

>The BBC is the best media service in existence

Hyperbolic claim, so I will ignore it.

>it is generally more free of bias than any other available source, especially when covering international matters.

I disagree, especially when the British have an interest in the outcome of an international situation.

Not the government, and they won't lose their lives for it, but they do live in a country that records "non-crime hate incidents" and shows them to people requesting your criminal record.

Also worth noting that Al Jazeera's coverage in English and Arabic are obviously different.

Cool, you can have a checkbox for 'Protect me from being stupid' and click it on each of your searches. This allows you to be protected from "state-sponsored spam" without imposing your intellectual shortcomings on everyone else.

Downranking "disinformation" could be seen as creating the sort of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_bubble that Weinberg often denigrates.

> As a result, users become separated from information that disagrees with their viewpoints, effectively isolating them in their own cultural or ideological bubbles. The choices made by these algorithms are not transparent.

I don't think it's unfounded criticism.

One problem is how arbitrary the categorization of "disinformation" can be. Once you go down the path, it can also create a scenario where you tacitly approve the things you don't decide to censor/downrank. While I can argue both sides, it simply doesn't come without trade-offs.

No, it can't. A filter bubble is specifically defined as users getting personalized results for the same query based on what an algorithm knows about them. It's right there in the first paragraph on wikipedia.

A hyper-partisan search engine that only showed results that favor one viewpoint would be bad, but it wouldn't be a filter bubble.

When I read the wiki page, I don't personally think much swivels on whether a human or algorithm creates the filter since the reason it's an issue is the end result.

Or rather, "it's okay since it's not an algorithm doing it" doesn't wave away the concerns very effectively.

The argument you're responding to wasn't "it's okay since it's not an algorithm doing it". It was "it's not a filter bubble since it's not personalized".

This is not an us or them case, is a true or false case. And false and true don't share a value of 50/50%. Unless we want to use a browser as moron-classifier, false results had a value of 0 in a search.

False facts are valuable in a search only as if tagged as debunked as false in the same page.

With search taken as a whole, the search results a person gets varies depending on a personal factor (namely, their go-to search engine) and not just the query. That's similar to a filter bubble, even if it isn't precisely one.

Filter bubbles are personalized. This is not personalized.

No it doesn't. What creates filter bubbles is ranking sites differently for each person, what has no relation at all with the criteria you use on your rank.

Personally, I use DDG because it's useful. As long as the new ranking makes them more useful, more power to them. If they do it wrong, I'll start looking for some replacement.

If Google did that (as they do) it would require some discussion about censorship and monopolies, but yeah, there's nothing wrong with DDG doing it.

>No it doesn't. What creates filter bubbles is ranking sites differently for each person, what has no relation at all with the criteria you use on your rank

That's assuming there's only one platform. When users can choose other search engines (or social media sites, video platforms, etc) then it absolutely creates a filter bubble when each platform injects its own bias into its content. No algorithm is perfect but I'd generally prefer my search results without deliberate bias.

Plus you'd have to be knee deep in the koolaid to think that only russian sources are propaganda. It just ao happens they are obviously on the "other side" today but let's not pretend that US and Ukranian sources aren't coming with their own healthy dose of spin.

For example, all the recent reports of civilian infrastructure being bombed are most certainly leaving out that these buildings were being used by Ukranian forces, much like reports of Israel targeting civilian buildings. That doesn't justify the russian actions since putin is fighting an unjust war of aggression, but that important context is an example of spin that is all over the "approved" sources of information.

The case of different platforms is not a filter bubble. It's just a social bubble like it always existed.

The fundamental feature of a filter bubble is that you can not escape it. If all it takes is looking at another site, it's not it.

Anyway, I prefer my search results devoid of known falsehoods. I don't believe it at all that DDG can achieve this, but if there's a loud known source of that can be cut without false positives, I do prefer that it's cut. Unfortunately, verifying the mainstream news isn't such an easy task, so that DDG will become both more reliable and more biased at the same time. Personally, I don't care much for the bias. I care about the reliability.

(And yes, all of your conclusions are probably true.)

I really don't understand this view point. Isn't a search engine's entire job to effectively 'censor' the parts of the internet that aren't relevant or helpful to your search query?

Is it censorship for them to downrank flat-earth content when you are trying to learn about how to chart a flight? Flat-earthers certainly have a lot of ideas about how charting a course on a flat earth works but that doesn't mean it's helpful to a reasonable person.

At least in their case they truly believe it, with disinformation the entire goal is to exploit DDGs users to pretty much everyone's detriment. Of course if I search for "RT ukrainian conflict" RT should show up, but do you really want your search engine to default to providing results from someone with a very clear agenda and a history of abusing their influence to carry out that agenda?

Of course its possible that the net is too wide, but I find it weird that there is a slippery slope censorship argument going on when search engines have been trying to serve authentic results and beat out inauthentic ones for 20+ years.

If I am interested in Flat Earth Theory and search for that then I expect to get results that Flat Earth believers are interested in. It’s that simple.

If you're actually interested in flat earth theory you'll search for "Flat Earth." If you search for "Charting a Flight", You're probably not looking for flat earth content.

To me that has to do with search results being tuned for relevancy, not due the the perceived quality of the information.

Maybe, but you could also argue that bad information is irrelevant. If I search for "cancer treatment", it's not necessarily helpful for "black salve" to pop-up on my search results.

And a Flat Earth take on how to chart a flight path isn't relevant because...?

The announcement makes me suspect that it's down-ranking results not for what they are, but who it's from. That is, penalizing results based on their being from a disfavored source.

That's been a valid approach ever since expertsexchange.com dropped off the radar. It's one of the many tools in the toolbox for dealing with SEO games.

> but do you really want your search engine to default to providing results from someone with a very clear agenda and a history of abusing their influence to carry out that agenda?

This is a very strange strawman. The implicit assumptions in this question are:

- That DuckDuckGo 'defaulted' to RT or to some other Russian media, which is hardly the case. It is the task of a search engine to infer, from its users' behaviour, which resources they find the most useful in providing answers to given queries.

- That other sources do not have a clear agenda :-)

>but do you really want your search engine to default to providing results from someone with a very clear agenda and a history of abusing their influence to carry out that agenda

Have you met the US media?

If you don't look at this massive coordinated effort and smell something fishy, I just don't know what to say.

So like, what, everyones keeping this big secret and its just schlubs like you and me kept in the dark?

It's not a conspiracy (few things are because they just don't scale well). It's more what I call "assholes with similar motives/incentives." It has a lot of the appearance of coordination without needing secret meetings in smoke-filled rooms.

That said, sometimes it actually is coordination. Just look at the JournoList scandal.

Isn't the "JournoList scandal" just "There was a Google Group that lots of journalists on the left subscribed to?"

Journalists have always talked to each other. The fact that we have an auditable mailing list of one instance of it just tells us something we already know.

>Isn't the "JournoList scandal" just "There was a Google Group that lots of journalists on the left subscribed to?"

No, they were coordinating messaging to get the results they wanted. That's the scandal, because they were simultaneously presenting themselves as Objective Journalists.

"If the right forces us all to either defend Wright or tear him down, no matter what we choose, we lose the game they've put upon us. Instead, take one of them – Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares – and call them racists"

Yes, that sounds like journalists just "talking to each other."

It definitely sounds like off-the-record talk.

Oh course, they forgot that everything on a mailing list is definitionally on-the-record.

I don't think it's some kind of backroom secret that most media, US, Russian, or otherwise, is utter shit. It should be pretty evident from looking at its coverage of any subject of which you have a better-than-average understanding of, or from contrasting how media produced in different parts of the world looks at the same exact events. Or even from applying a little bit of critical thinking. From looking at what it gets right, what it gets wrong, and to what degree it is wrong.

Unfortunately, the alternatives to mainstream media (Q-idiots, Zero Hedge, Info Wars, random dude with an opinionated blog, some pot comedian's podcast, viral memes on facebook, etc), tend to be even worse. And for every time they may occasionally be right about something, there's another dozen times when they are laughably, pants-on-head wrong.

There's no easy solution to being informed... That you can just passively consume on your smartphone.

>Unfortunately, the alternatives to mainstream media (Q-idiots, Zero Hedge, Info Wars, random dude with an opinionated blog, some pot comedian's podcast, viral memes on facebook, etc)

The alternative to one source of dubious information is not another source of dubious information. The alternative is to have access to all sorts of information, and piece together what you think is true, using your own critical thinking skills and ability to sniff out BS.

That used to be the Internet. It is not the Internet anymore, since the Internet has, for the first time I can think of, decided that This One Particular Country is uniquely bad, for Reasons, and should therefore be unpersoned; and also has the ability to squelch any dissent because so much of the Internet has become siloed in big corporations. It's really weird, and I find it suspicious.

> The alternative is to have access to all sorts of information, and piece together what you think is true, using your own critical thinking skills and ability to sniff out BS.

This strategy is vulnerable to supply-chain attacks on your information sources... which is exactly what Russian information warfare carries out.

The credibility of American and European "mainstream media" is oft-maligned but rarely actually demonstrated to be suspect at a large scale in the news departments. Editorial choices of what to cover and when are the most common complaint, which is a far cry from astroturfing and falsehoods made out of whole cloth that Russian sources typically engage in.

>This strategy is vulnerable to supply-chain attacks on your information sources

There is no single strategy, there is no silver bullet. I certainly didn't intend to imply that there was. One can only make their best effort. Any strategy is going to have flaws.

>which is a far cry from astroturfing and falsehoods made out of whole cloth that Russian sources typically engage in

American mass media has historically done exactly those things. There never was a time where The News was trustworthy, unbiased, and disinterested in politics. This continues today. You can look around the Internet--at least for now--and find where people have compiled examples of mainstream American news flat-out staging a scene for the TV to give an impression that is not true, such as a long-distance zoomed in shot of a crowd that makes the few dozen protesters seem like they fill a large area.

I wouldn't downplay the editorial decisions that you mention either. That is a hugely powerful lever of control. Yanking RT or whoever from search results is exactly that, only this time it is exercised by corporate tech companies.

Finally, one can always find a reason why this thing is worse than this other thing, and one is therefore justified in doing whatever it is one wanted to do anyway. This line of argumentation rarely impresses me.

> I wouldn't downplay the editorial decisions that you mention either. That is a hugely powerful lever of control. Yanking RT or whoever from search results is exactly that, only this time it is exercised by corporate tech companies.

The costs of letting disinformation flow freely are far greater than the costs of downranking sources known for disinformation. One only need look at the antivax movement to confirm this.

> Finally, one can always find a reason why this thing is worse than this other thing, and one is therefore justified in doing whatever it is one wanted to do anyway. This line of argumentation rarely impresses me.

Good thing the responsible parties have no interest in or duty regarding impressing you, then. Whatabouters don't impress me, personally.

>The costs of letting disinformation flow freely

As I said, "one can always find a reason why this thing is worse than this other thing, and one is therefore justified in doing whatever it is one wanted to do anyway." Simply slap a "disinformation" label on it.

I hope you are similarly motivated by these airy principles when the next government employs these same tactics to do things you do not agree with, but I rather suspect you will not be.

I would be interested in seeing perspectives of North Korean leadership and current events shared by their state media apparatuses purely for educational/entertainment value.

In general, however, truthful and accurate information is more valuable for learning about a topic. I’m not going to rely on getting that from a regime that imprisons people for sharing data and analyses that challenge the regime’s narrative. It’s inherently more untrustworthy than a society that protects free press.

When these regimes target their media for foreign audiences like you and me, it’s in their best interest to mask the origin of that content. Becoming more informed becomes harder when this context is unavailable to us.

Ranking those sources lower specifically improves the end product and results in a better informed user.

I think you're conflating "large coordinated action" with "the Internet." They look similar, but it's more that a critical mass of not-Russia is deciding to stand up to Russia because Russia's political action in this situation is some seriously beyond-the-pale early-20th-century war of conquest stuff.

There is some consolidation happening (mostly around the fact that a lot of the companies we regularly use are "Western" and most of the governments of the West have imposed sanctions on Russia that those companies have to comply with), but it's also a that the meme has taken hold that (a) Russia deserves to be opposed and (b) sanctions and cutting-off are an effective way to oppose them.

The advantage of getting information from a diverse set of random sources is that they're often pretty good at exposing the misinformation of other sources.

Mainstream sources keep talking about a particular bill and then you read, "hey, that's a misrepresentation, here's the text of the bill and it doesn't say that." They link to the text on the government website and it turns out, they're right. The bill doesn't say that.

Then the same guy starts talking about vaccines and you have to go somewhere else to see the debunk of that.

If you compare mainstream Russian media to mainstream US media and come to the conclusion that they're equally "utter shit", then you have no idea what you're talking about.

I didn't say they are equally bad, but they are both, objectively, quite bad. They can also both be worth reading, but you need to both know the history, and think about what you are reading, why it was written, and who it was written for.

It doesn't need to be a secret. If you have a megaphone that everyone hears all the time, you will simply have more influence than people who whisper quietly.

6 companies dominate the media [1] which together make up at least 90% of all media [2]. Note that this isn't limited to just news.

[1] https://www.fool.com/investing/stock-market/market-sectors/c...

[2] https://tacomacc.libguides.com/c.php?g=599051&p=4586162

Also, you might find this video either amusing or alarming

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fHfgU8oMSo

That's just dull contrarianism: suspecting "something fishy" just because everyone's opinions happen to line up. (As opposed to, I dunno, an obvious collective response to a nation doing something incontrovertibly wrong?)

>As opposed to, I dunno, an obvious collective response to a nation doing something incontrovertibly wrong?

Can you explain how this is incontrovertibly different than other foreign war entanglements from the past few decades?

What was the last war that had such an overwhelming and unanimous international response?

That is question-begging of the first order, and also circular logic. "A unanimous response is not fishy, because it is incontrovertibly wrong; it is incontrovertibly wrong because the response is unanimous."

Very odd reply.

Not really. It is hard to get disparate nations to agree on anything, unless you suspect there is a secret, central party coordinating the response. Consensus of this unusual sort gives credence to the claims.

When was the last time a sovereign, democratic, western nation invaded?

You have to squint pretty hard to call Ukraine a western nation.

Is it the "western nation" part that makes this different?

You realize there was also a massive coordinated effort by the media to defeat Nazi Germany, right?

I know it's rare nowadays, but sometimes, gasp, large groups of people across organizations and industries can coordinate for a mutually beneficial and morally virtuous cause. At this point, I'm sure someone could start another massive genocide with HD livestreams of the gas chambers and some people would still be like "hmmm, this coordinated effort to stop Hitler 2.0 sure seems fishy".

I've lost all hope.

There are many problematic aspects of DDG's decision, but here are just a couple of angles.

Both sides in the conflict spread disinformation. DDG desides to downrank only results related to disinformation from one side. This makes it a decision based on a political bias and not search quality bias (which would cause all disinformation to be downranked - which is OK and actually a desireable thing in a search engine). By not downranking disinformation from the other side, which is equally bad content, this steps out of the scope of what a search engine should be interested in doing.

Secondly, how in the world would DDG have the resources or capabilities to determine what is disinformation in the first place? Much larger companies like Facebook failed at this. It is generally considered that the 'fog of war' is a real thing and there is no single source of news on this planet that did not spread some disinformation at some point. DDG would probably have to downrank half of the sites in its results, and probably every site that ever published any information about this conflict, if they were to be consistent. Something like this is basically unenforcable from an engineering/algorithmic standpoint.

So basically from a business perspective, this has to be a bet that the publicity from this act would net them more users than they started with in the markets they care about.

> Both sides in the conflict spread disinformation.

One of them does not have free press and kill journalists. Both cases are not even remotely comparable.

But a general purpose web search engine should not be in a business of determining which side has a higher moral ground in a human conflict?

The west does imprison journalists because at least there is enough public pressure that it would never be accepted, even if the result is comparable.

But it is specifically not a question about who the good guy is. This is about hiding certain information.

The free market will decide what's a valuable search result or not, and I trust the freedom and liberty of people over any kind of curated, mutated ranking system.

Is people choosing which search engine they use based off the results it returns not the free market in action?

It is not transparent what kind of curations take place to return the results. You cannot have a free market without transparency, and while DDG are announcing this now, they have no obligation to in the future. Previously the status quo was "we don't curate", now it's "we curate but announce it". What's the chance that they will no longer announce it in the future?

> It is not transparent what kind of curations take place to return the results.

This is true for all search engines because it's literally impossible to return even half decent results if everyone knows your algorithm. It'll just be pages and pages of SEO nonsense. If you believed for even a second that search engines can exist without curating you haven't been thinking very hard. Not curating would only ensure that you see nothing but propaganda.

> you haven't been thinking very hard

Please ensure you're following the HN Guidelines[1] when leaving replies :^)

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Could it work?

A search engine based on popularity is the basis of google 2004.

What no one has done is a search engine where you can select who's version of what's popular to use. What do people in my area.. My age group.. My shared interest visit when they search 'eye blush'

> You cannot have a free market without transparency

I've not heard this before. So I need to know the wages of the workers, what the CEO had for breakfast, the favorite color of all employees, the inventory and sales, etc for every single company in order for it to be a free market?

I'm not arguing that knowing these things would be bad but actually curious of the boundaries you would draw when you say "transparency" such that it would encompass the exact algorithms used in a privately-owned search engine.

The more mature a market the more you would know. Transparency material to the market transaction. Knowing what employees ate would rarely provide value to whatever transaction you have. Understanding their selection process for the content they provide to you would be.

What the hotdog vendor dreamed of last night doesn't inform my buying decision like the fact that it fell on the floor earlier would.

Maybe I want to know if the employees are all vegan or something before I support that company. I guess I'll frame the same question in a different context: if all needs are subjective, how do you objectively determine which information is important for a transaction?

Free markets require competition. Are there other search engines of similar quality that don't do this?

> I trust the freedom and liberty of people

"Trust" is usually earned. On what basis have "people" earned your trust?

"unbiased" doesn't mean "unfiltered". For example, I don't want spam or malware in my search results.

Search results should return good information that is relevant to your query, and filter out anything that is not that.

What if I'm doing research on the specific types of misinformation?

I don't want results of sites telling me the misinformation is going on, but I want the actual bits of misinformation for proper attribution.

There's always edge cases

You'll have the same challenges as the people who are researching spam or malware. I could see a use-case for a niche product that specifically doesn't filter bad results, but I'm pretty sure DDG wants to be a general-purpose search engine first.

If it's not appearing in the searches then it's not "going on".

If you're looking for what specific sites are saying, you can still do that.

If you search "Ukraine news RT" on DDG you get Ukraine news from RT. It's still there if you look for it. It just isn't near the top of a "Ukraine news" query (I assume you'd find it there eventually if you scroll enough)

All you have to do is scroll past the US misinformation, on past EU misinformation and you'll find it right there. Easy.

Sorry but it just isn't the same. Russia made it illegal -- punishable by 15 years in prison -- to accurately describe their invasion of Ukraine.

I'm not in Russia and DDG isn't limiting their distortion to Russian visitors to their site.

They weren't suggesting otherwise. They were suggesting that Russia's disinformation campaign has been particularly egregious and intentional.

isn't that whataboutism?

I think you can go to jail for supporting the russian invasion in some european countries right now too.

Is there a source for this?

I'll just do a quick search on DDG for that...

https://twitter.com/tjmcintyre/status/1501594050478153739

This is what the ukrainian embassy in slovakia claimed. I guess official ukrainian sources have been incredibly unreliable but I haven't seen any fact check on their claims

>Czech law enforcement warns that public approval of Russia's invasion of Ukraine could be classified as a "crime of denial, questioning, approval and justification of GENOCIDE." There are already the first two cases of detainees incriminated in this paragraph of the Criminal Code.

https://twitter.com/UKRinCZE/status/1497829641171525634

Shouldn't it be the embassy in the Czech Republic or is it really the Ukraine embassy in Slovakia commenting on Czech law? Not trying to be difficult just generally wondering. Tried looking at the link but twitter wants me to sign up to view it.

Sorry, my mistake! I think it's in the Czech Republic (though I think slovakia did something similar too), I'm only relying on Google translate so I might be very wrong

Cool ty!

If supporting means driving a tank in Berlin and bombing an hospital, yes, most probably you will go to jail.

For a long, long, time.

If it means saying that Russia is right, definitely not.

Not really, it really is just supporting russia even without any violence. For example in lithuania:

>The decision bans to organize or gather at assemblies “aimed at supporting, in any form or scope, the actions of the Russian Federation and/or the Republic of Belarus, which caused the introduction of the state of emergency” while this state of emergency remains in place.

https://www.baltictimes.com/lithuania_extends_state_of_emerg...

>The new legislation, which passed parliament with 71 votes in favour out of 117 cast, banned public events in support of "Russia or Belarus actions which led to this state of emergency".

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/lithuania-tightens-stat...

Well, for Lithuania is personal. I can't blame them for not wanting to support their own destruction falling in a 'Donbas trap'

No disagreement, war is war and they are in a vulnerable position

Officially they made it illegal to inaccurately describe their invasion.

For example by calling it an "invasion" as you just did.

Oops - lucky I am not in Russia...

"Good information" is very subjective. Some people think Fox News information is good, others think it's all lies. Some people think Wikipedia is the closest thing to Word of God that we can get, others think it's a bunch of kids with too much free time on their hands writing about things they have no idea about. Some people think the US government is trustworthy, others think it lied so many times only an idiot can trust it again. Which information is "good"? If a hundred newspapers publish the same article because they are all owned by the same company which told them to - is it "spam"? If a hundred TV anchors all read the same message while pretending it's local news - is it "spam"?

I am not saying there's nothing to be done here - but let's not pretend it's easy and obvious and there's some objective way to see what's "good information" that does not involve a lot of human judgement and a lot of bias that comes with it.

Determining which search results are good to return is the hard part about creating a search engine, and it’s definitely not a problem limited to politically charged content.

Having worked on search engines, I know it only too well. Defining "good result" is a very complex task, that even without politics intruding involves a lot of judgement and very complex and un-obvious choices. Is good result something people would frequently click on? Then clickbait would be the best search results ever - do we really want this? Is it something a lot of people search for? Is it a popular site? Is it a site belonging to a large advertiser? And when politics comes to it, it becomes a mess. So pretending it's clear and obvious - just remove "bad results" and show "good results" - is really not understanding the problem.

You are listing a bunch of methods that might be useful indicators of "good content", useful for search engine algorithms. But those are merely (possible) symptoms. "Good" is a quality of the content itself, made up of factors such as relevancy, accuracy, completeness, readability etc. Nobody said it was necessarily easy to judge these things, especially at scale. But that doesn't mean that it doesn't exist.

> "Good" is a quality of the content itself, made up of factors such as relevancy, accuracy, completeness, readability etc.

It’s impossible to quantify a rating based on these subjective qualities you listed. I think the point is you can’t remove the human element from ranking search results without leaving the search engine open to exploitation.

"Good information", almost synonymous with "truth", is not subjective. It is objective, observable fact. The fact that is a lot of disagreement, propaganda, and lies concerning that truth does not render it subjective.

> "Good information", almost synonymous with "truth"

Truth gets you about 1% of the way towards returning "good information". What are the ideal search results for "orange"?

This one is actually easy. Most commonly, orange is a color and a fruit. I'm sure we can all pretty easily list some objective facts about both of those things.

Orange is also the name of a town in some places, and a county in others. But I think you need more search terms in order to disambiguate. The search engine can't read minds, after all.

Maybe the user was actually looking to pay their phone bill? (The first result in DDG is orange.fr, not the color or the fruit)

My point is, there's no objective way to determine what good search results are. There are thousands of different objective measurements which people combine in subjective ways to create a subjective algorithm.

Absolutely, but then who is responsible for judging what is true and what is false? And why should I trust those people not only to be correct all the time, but also to never fall victim to their own biases when making these decisions?

The point is that there is no such thing as a perfect arbiter of truth. I may trust a friend with whom I have a close personal relationship to always tell me the truth, but it seems foolish to place that kind of trust in a corporation full of people you don't know.

In the end, we're back to just not filtering information at all, but instead leaving it up to each individual to decide what's true and which isn't. This also clearly has not worked. Maybe this problem is just not solvable.

I see this comment in so many forms across many channels. “Oh no, there is no truth anymore!” (Sorry if I sound a bit pedantic)

But that’s not truth either. While gaining a 20/20 truth picture is hard, it’s not impossible to get a picture that’s accurate enough.

Lots of information can be lock-stepped into a picture that gives enough clarity. A combination of experts, reports and documentation, high quality sources, context awareness, and people I know around the globe gives me a good enough picture.

Also the message that there is no such thing as truth is exactly what disinformation strategists want to amplify.

Yes it’s worrying, but not unsolvable.

I feel like good news can distill down to: if there's not enough fact checking in the right domain(s), the editor fucked up. Conspiracy theories, and propaganda obviously fail this test, but do not do so online often enough. Especially not when grifters/propagandists are trying to make money through ads or are state funded by an autocratic government.

Should DDG take into account what is and isn't fact-checked? Absolutely, and if DDG gets better at this, their users will benefit.

I agree. I also believe transparency should be there on what changes are made in some shape or form. Unlike Google, DDG could actually do this.

A disinformation search engine would be interesting..

Back during the first Iraq war (Kuwait) my sociology class did an analysis of all the news to see how they reported it differently. We look at the 6:00 news on ABC, NBC, and CBS and I asked if we could also add CNN because this was when cable was still being adopted. What we learned was back then CNN largely reported the facts/observations with qualified statements and not much commentary at all, and all the other news outlets got the bulk of their facts (except for local news) from the CNN newswires/people on the ground and then fluffed them with their own subjective language. That was when CNN was just Headline News. They've really lost credibility since then. I'm not even sure if Headline News even exists anymore. It used to just be every 30 minutes the news cycled over and over and updated as new info came up.

AP News is generally what everyone pulls from and reports mostly straight facts

"Good information", almost synonymous with "truth", is not subjective.

Truth is "not subjective" in the sense that force of will can't change the answer to even very fraught questions like "what programming paradigm works best in situation X" or "which running back would do best on team X in superbowl Y".

But one's judgement on the truth of complex question depends on one's opinions on the meaning of various terms, reliability of various individuals, the dynamics of human psychology, etc. This overall situation results in people's opinions being hard to compare and "truth is subjective" is often shorthand for this, although it would be nicer to have a different word.

You're saying as knowing what the "truth" is is an obvious thing, and anybody could do it, and anybody could recognize whether certain statement is "truth" or not. But it is far from being the case. Many very smart and very honest people routinely disagree on many subjects whether something is truth or not, and on top of that many people also make statements that may look like truth but turn out not to be after detailed and complicated investigation. You can not expect an owner of the search engine to be the arbiter in these disagreements and to perform those investigations. And even if they did, who would ensure they themselves are being objective and not just enacting their own biases and hiding facts that they think are inconvenient to them? How do you observe this fact? The truth may be not subjective, in a pure Platonic sense, but our knowledge about it and our trust in ways how to get to it certainly would be.

Truth, because different people have different axioms or goals, might be subjective. I don't think this relates to quality of information.

A higher quality information media will give you the tools to get more information, and this is for example where wikipedia shines by requiring citations. Even if some piece of information there is wrong, you usually get the tools to obtain more information, and you get a summary (where they do attempt to stay neutral) of multiple positions when there is no consensus.

Quality of information is not precisely equals to truth, some questions to ask of any information relay: - Do they give you the sources for their information ? - Do they make a good faith attempt to stay neutral ? - If not staying neutral, do they make their position and conflicts of interest clear ? - Do they provide adequate (non-strawmen) summaries of opposing views ? - What is their process for correcting information ?

Of course wikipedia isn't perfect, but it is a higher than average quality of information on the internet. You should use wikipedia (or any source really) as an authoritative source (something isn't tree just because it is written their), but it is an excellent starting point. As most other good sources of information are.

You can't easily judge the veracity of any piece of information on any platform, but you can more easily judge a good faith attempt at providing you the tools to obtain further information.

No platform is going to be perfect, but these criteria should help anyone to filter out bad news sources, and it should not be impossible to convince most people that these are good criteria.

> Search results should return good information that is relevant to your query

Then they would also filter ukrainian, NATO, EU, US, etc disinformation. Almost all the disinformation that you see on social media ( western ) is ukrainian, NATO, EU, US, etc disinformation since russia has self-isolated itself to some degree and much of russian media/propaganda has been banned.

If DDG said we will down-rank sites associated with Ukranian, NATO, US disinformation, then maybe we could give them a benefit of the doubt.

Not all disinformation is created equal, and that's a critical difference.

The Russian and Ukrainian sides are not moral equals.

If Russia says Ukraine is full of drug addicts, whores and nazis, and that bombing hospitals is necessary to protect itself from Ukraine - that's of course disinformation.

If Ukraine says they have killed 10,000 Russian soldiers, when the real number is closer to 5,000 - that too is disinformation (exaggeration) and I'm not interested in seeing it strictly censored for multiple reasons. 1) It's not a radical exaggeration, such as claiming they've killed 250,000 soldiers or entirely stopped the Russian assault; and 2) it contains quite interesting information: a claim of significant invader deaths (from the supposedly mighty Russian military), which prompts inquiry as to just how bad Russia is fairing. While Ukraine for example has exaggerated their successes, their successes have been remarkable and have shown Russia to be mismanaged, incompetent, weak, and everything else one would expect of a typical authoritarian regime - it looks like a duck, it quacks like a duck, and how wonderful it is a duck. Probably the most remarkable thing about Putin's Russia - considering the kleptocracy - was that it had supposedly managed to maintain a very potent, mostly competent military, which is unusual for such a long authoritarian slog. That turned out to be false, Putin is wildly incompetent as are most authoritarians historically. He's no different than what we've seen in the past with other strong-man dictatorships like Hussein (also a paper tiger military, no coincidence the US chewed through their mediocre Soviet hardware too).

Not all disinformation provides anything valuable to the context as far as anti-fog-of-war information goes. Some disinformation is particularly worthless garbage. Plenty of what Ukraine is revealing does reveal valuable information, whereas very little of what Russia has been saying does the same.

And morally I'm not interested in Russia winning. I'm interested in Russia losing in humiliating fashion, getting isolated, having its economy chopped down by 75%, and in the coming decades seeing the nation split into three or four countries and overall massively weakened to prevent the Russian empire from attempting to emerge again with the next Putin that must inherently follow from their culture of power and conquest lust.

I'm no more interested in leveling the playing field for Russia as I would be for Nazi Germany. They're increasingly similar monsters, and Putin is only likely to get worse as time continues on. The absolute last thing the West should do is treat Ukraine and Russia similarly. We should do whatever it takes to defeat Russia, including winning the propaganda war - the only alternative is to vacate that space to Russia (a neutral outcome in propaganda is next to impossible).

I agree that the two sides aren't morally equal. However, that doesn't mean that more moral disinformation is less so disinformation, and choosing to let one over the other is being biased.

You could argue however that this a good bias to have, and that's definitely a discussion that deserves to be had and where I'm personally not decided. However, it's good to agree that this is indeed a bias beforehand.

Forget leveling the playing field. Removing western disinformation is still important too. Forget specific positives or disinformation about Russia specifically attacking Ukraine. There’s plenty of other misinformation from western powers relating to Russia. I haven’t seen much chatter at all about the western specifically America’s role in what Russia is today. How often is the IMF and related neoliberal capitalist/imperialist intervention in Russia, starting the second the USSR dissolved, brought up?

This is important stuff to know. I did a few sample searches. The results aren’t wrong. They are incredibly dry. Many being direct studies and long PDFs. People aren’t going to go through that stuff when seeing how Russia is getting rekt or Ukraine is suffering or gas prices are up are consumable via many pics, quick takes, social media takes, and more.

I think it’s important also because of your wording. Russia being the kleptocracy. You didn’t say the west isn’t. It is heavily implied IMO though.

Another unfortunate issue is this all will cloud the west in even more misinformation. The best non dense news knowledge from TV I gained regarding Yemen was from RT. The west is awful at covering the tragedy there. Not to mention complicit too. RT was slanted ofc. Not saying that’s what should be aimed for.

Similarly if Russian economy collapsing by 75% and screwing with the lives of 100M avg Russians as it splits into 3 or 4 is something to aim for. The non mention of NATO being a pointless organization today but especially in a collapsed Russia world would be good to know. That info won’t be given out much I presume. Also to note. No one really suffers remotely like 100M+ Russians if NATO disbanded. Though I’m sure the massive amt of misinformation when the west doesn’t want to keep helping out the millions of Russian refugees in your dreamt future will be absolutely insane. Just like relatively minor amounts of refugees now keep getting called things like the migrant crisis.

Russia should not be hurting and killing Ukrainians. America and others should not be helping Yemen or Palestine or other places have innocents suffering or killed. Most of all, we shouldn’t get ourselves into a state where we keep patting ourselves on the back and pointing to boogeymen to escape culpability. Which is pretty much guaranteed in a future of a collapsed Russia with millions of refugees that NATO will have little interest in helping but will engage in a massive amt of misinformation to escape the very obvious moral failings. At least this is all almost certain to happen based on the present (excluding the help Ukrainian refugees are getting which may be proving the pt more by being such a markedly unique exception) and past.

"The non mention of NATO being a pointless organization today but especially in a collapsed Russia world would be good to know."

WHY ISNT MY RIDICULOUS OPINION BEING PRESENTED AS FACT BY THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA??????????????

You realize how insane your arguments are, right?

wasn't nato created to counter the ussr?

The USSR or whatever country rulled by whatever regime, as long as they maintain a large enough army, all while preventing Europe from building its own, is my guess.

Who’s preventing Europe? At most Germany is prevented to some degree.

“ridiculous opinion” is also your opinion. Who said no mainstream media is talking about this?* Who said it should be presented as fact? Even I don’t believe it should be presented as fact. That would be misinformation. Even presenting something I whole heartedly agree with — bigotry is wrong. That’s not fact.

*I was obviously exaggerating with “non mention”. It was also one small part in my thought out, serious and long comment.

However your exaggerations of all caps, “being presented as fact” and “ridiculous opinion” (again which is just your opinion) are all negatives and don’t help any sort of dialogue.

This topic is discussed in the mainstream. Off top of head: BBC, Guardian, Al Jazeera, PBS, NPR, WNYC, WBEZ, WHYY, CBC, The Daily Show, The Young Turks, AJ+, NowThis, Pod Save America, Slate, Vox, Vice all have certainly covered this. Previously, Fox, Tucker Carlson (within Fox and his other affiliations), OAN, NewsMax, Daily Wire, and more on the right have also covered this and before changing their stances because of the public, were very much anti NATO.

I can see how a few listed can be claimed as non mainstream. That’s fair. Though other media listed like Pod Save America and Daily Wire have top 10 most popular podcasts. I think that can count as mainstream.

If publications like WaPo or the biggest podcast, Joe Rogan, have no discussed this yet. They will at some point to some degree.

I’m curious why you thought this fairly basic and quite common rhetoric necessitated an all caps response and hints of insanity that the mainstream cover it. I am respectfully, going with you being in your own bubble and not knowing too much about politics as my hunch and/or enjoying/preferring the status quo. However that’s just a hunch.

>If Russia says ... that bombing hospitals is necessary to protect itself from Ukraine - that's of course disinformation.

Actually this story is really "wag the dog" style https://waronfakes.com/civil/fake-russian-aviation-struck-a-...

Every story you read now is propaganda. West is just better and more experienced in this stuff than Russia.

>I'm interested in Russia losing in humiliating fashion, getting isolated, having its economy chopped down by 75%, and in the coming decades seeing the nation split into three or four countries and overall massively weakened

This scenario includes about 150 millions of people dead/suffering and world economy wrecked. How is this "moral"?

It sure seems like that "war on fakes" site is full on non-debunkings of things.

This article for example is just re-printing Russian government talking points:

https://waronfakes.com/civil/fake-russian-soldiers-wont-let-...

Which is fine, the authors can believe the Russian government if you want, but declaring the statements of the other side "fake" on only that basis isn't very credible.

>Every story you read now is propaganda. West is just better and more experienced in this stuff than Russia

You have such a good eye for propaganda! Congrats. Thanks for the education I will make waronfakes.com my homepage. From flipping link to link it looks perfectly fine, covers everything from all parties: Ukraine lying, NATO lying, lies about Russia lying, lies about DNR/LNR. Perfectly balanced

To be fair, they do not claim to cover both sides:

> We are the owners and administrators of several Russian non-political telegram channels.

> We don't do politics. But we consider it important to provide unbiased information about what is happening in Ukraine and on the territories of Donbass, because we see signs of an information war launched against Russia.

Granted, I would have liked to see a "FAKE: US funding biological weapon labs in Ukraine" there too.

How is it fake?

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/03/11/1566-m11.html

I am wondering about how your initial response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine was so ambiguous: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=vogre&next=30589151

And then all of your subsequent comments seem to be extremely consistent with Russian government talking points.

You were initially kind of concerned that the invasion was not justified, but now you believe the Russian government positions whole-heartedly?

It is a very interesting transition of opinion in a short amount of time! What's up?

My guess is that it is a result of russophobia. Kind of Newton's third law of motion, but for opinions.

Given how hard it is to find out what kind of research happened in Wuhan, despite it was possible to inspect it for as long as needed, I find it hard to believe that one can that quickly and single handedly (esp in the current context) be certain that some biological weapons were actually developed in that lab.

I've also witnessed a lot of biased "journalism" in India to push that unreasonable narrative.

That's more likely propaganda doubled as a humorous reminder of the WMD in 2003, in my opinion.

" their successes have been remarkable and have shown Russia to be mismanaged, incompetent, weak, and everything else one would expect of a typical authoritarian regime"

And doesn't make you excited for the war and enthusiastic about joining the fight for Ukraine? Great - but having only information and announcements from one side would give me pause. Somehow the war hasn't ended yet, despite of the zillions of Russian tanks that have been destroyed by now.

"Somehow the war hasn't ended yet, despite of the zillions of Russian tanks that have been destroyed by now."

Well if we're going to be pedantic and childish, then for your information, Russia started the war with 12.3 zillion tanks and the war is still going on because the Russians still have more tanks. The fact that zillions of tanks have been destroyed and that Russia still has plenty more tanks is not somehow a proof that the information about destroyed Russian tanks is false...

True. Many tanks have been destroyed. But the zillion tanks destroyed are often presented without context, and used to imply that resistance has a better prospect than is realistic. The number of remaining enemy tanks (or whatever) is seldom mentioned. Well, I guess that's what the GP was implying.

Please we don't need more hatred nor more call for escalation.

Nice try.

All the more important to not rely on mechanism that mirror Putins crackdown on information. The damage from disinformation is just smaller than to openly crack down on content you dislike. Fact checkers don't exist for too long and there are countless issues where they just reiterate the "correct" opinion.

I think there is a lot of projection in your goal here, but that is beside the point.

DDG also already downranks outlets that are not related to Russia.

it would be unbiased if they weren't specifically targeting russian disinformation

> "unbiased" doesn't mean "unfiltered". For example, I don't want spam or malware in my search results.

That seems like a cop-out to me. They're not filtering "spam or malware", they're filtering "Russian disinformation". What's next? Maybe OAN is "right-wing disinformation" and we should "filter" that too? What about fox news? How far can you use that excuse to say you're not biased?

> "Russian disinformation"

Which is spam.

If I search cure for cancer the pro bleach crowed will be annoyed that bleach doesn't comes up before chemotherapy. I'm assuming you haven't actually looked at the disinformation that Russian propagandists are putting out. They aren't just saying "Russia is justified in ensuring the independence of areas with people who consider themselves traditionally Soviets" this is "Ukraine is bombing itself to make Russia look bad".

If you're arguing search engines should bias for what you want to see then it shouldn't be ranking russian propaganda highly for western audiences, if you are arguing search engines should bias for facts then by definition it shouldn't be ranking russian propaganda highly.

You have rediscovered why it is difficult to make a search engine. This is a problem that applies to all search results, not just politically charged content: human judgement is always required to write a search algorithm.

So where does that leave us? Everything is biased? What does that mean when applied to duckduckgo's tweet from 2019? It's just a hollow slogan? I'm not sure that changes the conclusion much. The first impression I got from reading the comment was that the tweet from 2019 was a hollow PR message that they don't stand behind.

> So where does that leave us? Everything is biased?

Yes, humans have biases. There's not a way around it.

> What does that mean when applied to duckduckgo's tweet from 2019?

Yes, that tweet is obviously a vague marketing message, but if you read the entire quote in context, it was in reference to filter-bubble biases. It wasn't a claim that DDG employees are somehow superhuman creatures immune to human biases. Obviously that's a ridiculous interpretation.

Here's the source, in context:

https://spreadprivacy.com/why-use-duckduckgo-instead-of-goog...

> So where does that leave us? Everything is biased?

Search results are created by humans and intended to be consumed by humans, so yes. (And just to head it off, a web crawler is ultimately just an abstraction for the humans who will later consume the search results, it just happens to have particularly fast and strict browsing habits)

Now that said, accepting that "(un)biased" is an extremely broad term, I'd very easily believe that the intent of the tweet was to point at some specific type of bias that DDG (at the time) intended to avoid.

You should check out Algorithms of Oppression, a very good book about the exact topic you’re asking questions about.

Short answer yes, if humans are involved in making something it’s going to be subjected to the biases of those humans.

https://nyupress.org/9781479837243/algorithms-of-oppression/

No - they are explicitly adding bias here. They are coding it into their algorithm.

Frankly, I'd be surprised if there weren't implicit biases already there.

But this is something new. Its overt, explicit.

There is nothing about this that is close to new. Everyone who runs a real search engine on the public internet has a need to explicitly code in edge-cases from time to time.

> they are explicitly adding bias here.

All search engines are explicitly biased. That is the point, they generate a ranking of results. Heck even how you tokenize text is an explicit bias of what you match against.

I mean, do you feel that Fox and OAN deserve the same "reputation score" as Nature? If so, why?

For as much whining here about the importance of free and open discussion, it's unfortunately verboten to say it, but fortunately people will usually bring it up of their own volition. It is like the "why are all the highly educated people so liberal!?!?" thing, deep down you know the answer, and it's not actually "because of liberal indoctrination!", it's that truth itself has a bias, and so "unbiased" results that merely prefer truthiness can have a bias themselves. The fix for that isn't to present both as equally reputable (or worse, for the answer to be "unknowable" simply because "two parties disagree"), it's for the affected party to stop pushing disinformation and falsehoods.

Not all sources are created equal. Not even all news sources are created equal. And if you agree to that, then we agree on the merits, and it's just the outcomes that you disagree with.

(And lest you disagree - Fox News themselves went to court to argue that their programming is not "news media" and is not intended to be a source of truth, in response to slander/libel suits for saying and writing things that are factually untrue to service their political agenda. So even Fox News agrees they should have a lesser "reputation score" than even other news media.)

https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/new-yor...

I think you're under-estimating the quantity of articles Nature and associated journals publish that aren't scientific, or are outright wrong, just because they flatter the preconceptions of their readers. There's even a cute saying in science, "Just because it's published in Nature, doesn't mean it's wrong".

Example: Nature published Flaxman2020, a modelling paper by the epidemiology team at ICL which claimed lockdowns saved 3.1 million lives. People who actually read the article realized that it was a massive exercise in circular logic - the model assumed that any reductions in case numbers could only be due to government intervention. It was then presented as proof to the media that lockdowns saved lives. It had many other problems - in fact the authors themselves in the paper itself that it was illustrative only and that in reality, the effectiveness of NPIs would be lower. The circular nature of the argument was pointed out immediately but Nature only published a response letter 8 months after publication, and never retracted it.

As for your legal point, that doesn't mean much. Lawyers try any argument that might work. Facebook have argued in front of the court that their fact checking isn't actually fact checking at all, that it's in reality merely corporate political opinion, and that no reasonable person could possibly construe otherwise!

>As for your legal point, that doesn't mean much. Lawyers try any argument that might work.

No, I'm not willing to let them off the hook so easily. Why were they in a court of law in the first place? Because they lied to such an extent that it's literally illegal. If this hail-mary legal argument of "no reasonable person would believe us" was the best defence they could come up with, then that is approximately the most powerful indictment of their veracity as is possible to legally establish within our current framework. We should not let them live it down - they cannot have their cake and eat it.

It wasn't illegal, was it? Fox won that court case, because they stated that Tucker Carlson is commentary and not factual news reporting. Which is exactly what his show is, and the judge agreed.

At any rate, do you really think other news companies or talking heads never say things others think are untrue? The reason Fox ended up in a lawsuit is because people on the left are much more determined to take out anyone saying things they don't like than the other way around. It's not because CNN is actually more reliable.

> Just because it's published in Nature, doesn't mean it's wrong

Quoting this without understanding the philosophy of science, in context of discussion rejecting an equivalence between cable television and a peer-reviewed journal, seems like textbook whataboutism.

All published science is wrong to some degree. The point is to be less wrong, in gestalt, as time goes on. We push back the boundaries of ignorance to discover more. TV punditry echo chambers, where they revel in wrongness, are the antithesis of this process.

I understand the philosophy of science just fine. The problem with Nature articles is not that they are mostly right but a little bit wrong around the edges in ways other scientists will soon refine. The problem is they are often no better than science fiction. They are wrong, wrong at their core, the authors and editors know they are wrong and nobody cares because the conclusions are ideologically useful. It's not specific to Nature of course. Science as a whole has a massive problem with such papers. Way too many researchers/academics like to blow this problem off as just the normal scientific process - it's not.

"unbiased" doesn't mean "unfiltered".

What else can a filter be aside from a bias? Clearly, I'd want a search engine that's biased against spam and generally against "automatically generated" content.

It's hard for people to wrap their heads around how many search judgements are inherently editorial decisions - and how much of this is OK. One factor is that mainstream American news, from Hearst to the NY Times spent a long indoctrinating people on the claim that their position in the political spectrum was "balanced" where everything else was "extreme".

One actually useful thing a search engine could do is allow it's users to see it's biases and even configure their particular preferred filters - within reason. Could be a selling point.

Interestingly, that's what the Brave Search team has proposed. They call it "Goggles". Customizable, plainly visible biases instead of living in a search bubble without even knowing why.

When a search provider decides to allow one side of a story to be presented but to remove sites that present the other side, that's pure bias. It may be justifiable bias; that's arguable. But you can't call that unbiased by any sensible definition.

But that's not what DDG is claiming to be doing. They're claiming to remove outright falsehoods, not anything that could be considered favorable to the russian position.

since when falsehoods are only on one side?

This act by definition cannot be unbiased because only one side decides what information is false.

We aren't talking about spam or malware here though. We are talking about an entire country's media sources.

To what extent does their agreement with Microsoft allow them to change rankings? Will Ecosia, Qwant, Yahoo! and so on be doing, or have to do, the same?

As I understand it, based on previous comments on HN they can change ranking and inject results from their crawler into the search. The assumption that it’s just Bing comes which a bunch of asteriskes.

For me, this move by DDG will have the opposite effect of what is intended.

I will now trust my own media and sources even less, if they rely on silencing the competition and insist on controlling what I access "for my own good". Such dirty tactics are insulting, even more so when delivered under a sneering benevolent guise.

As if they have perfect knowledge of my motives and wishes. What if I'm genuinely curious as to how the Russian media is presenting this war? They must have access to this perfect knowledge if they are fit to decide which news sources are "correct"!

Would you trust a source of medical information less if it declined to present or link to information that breathing CO is healthy, drinking mineral spirits is fine, and handling mercury with bare skin is safe and fun?

I don’t know. Since this sort of thing isn’t happening and the general atmosphere of everything is unlike your hypothetical. I’m not sure it much matters.

The united states has several states passing laws so doctors can proscribe ivermectin for covid, we genuinely live in a world where homeopathy is a the option Steve Jobs took instead of cancer therapy.

I have no understanding of why you would say this is not happening when product brands like GOOP make tons of money from outright hocus pocus health bs.

I think Ivermectin was part of the CDC’s COVID prevention or when you have light levels of Covid lists back in 2020 and early 2021. I remember seeing it from progressive people sharing stuff before it became the term and meme it became today. That makes it a really interesting point too, but it makes all sides look bad.

OTOH, you’re right Steve Jobs and what he did...yikes. That sort of thinking is harmful for society.

Yes GOOP is disgusting. So disgusting.

I thi

OTOH, you’re right Steve Jobs and what he did...yikes. That sort of thinking is harmful for society.

Yes GOOP is disgusting. So disgusting.

None of this is close to laws being passed for serious misinformation sort of stuff like your original post said. GOOP is bullshit and like so much others. It just happens to be peddled by some famous people. Since the ivermectin thing is more complicated, it doesn’t work.

America having its massive problem with opoids and how much it got prescribed shows how difficult the situation is. Or how anti steroids America and the world is. It seems too nuanced and difficult to decipher. Or to say one way is correct.

Overall in spirit and likely general vibes. I believe we are overall closer to the same thinking than not.

>Would you trust a source of medical information less if it declined to present or link to information

Unfortunately, there's a wide ecosystem of conspiracy minded sites that link to each other. They even have papers supporting them, eg. studies in favor of homeopathy https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9310601/

My favorite Randi joke about homeopathy...

"An homeopath died from overdose. He forgot to take his medicaments..."

Well let's flip this around. How many articles of misinformation advocating breathing CO would you have to read before you personally tried it?

If the answer is that you never would, then you are not advocating for something that protects you, just those that you see as inferior to you

Yeah, actually. Let me tell you about something that will illustrate. Once upon a time, Amazon had a flood of fake reviews. They would rate to 5 and be in terrible Engrish and the different styles were pretty easy to detect. I could use that as a signal that the product was bad and that the field of these products is likely risky.

Eventually, Amazon started getting rid of all these reviews. There are still fake reviews but they're more subtle than that. So now I have lost my signal that said "tread carefully for products in this class" and I have lost some signal that said "this product has fakers involved or in its competitors".

So now, yes, I trust Amazon less.

I am not making up a hypothetical universe. I am sure others have shared this experience.

Well, I started trusting the sources of medical information less since they quickly moved from “masks don’t help common people” to “everyone should wear a mask” in a heartbeat even though we had a dozen of epidemics and a couple pandemics before so surely that sounds like something that should a settled issue (saying we don’t know and it heavily depends on the infection would also count as a good answer).

> I will now trust my own media and sources even less, if they rely on silencing the competition and insist on controlling

As you should! It's actually exactly what authoritarian governments like Russia do. They silence and control information, blocking out other sources aside from their own propaganda. Everything else is said to be dangerous disinformation.

It's insane to me that people don't think this way. The mainstream US media, in perfect lockstep with the gov, told us all that iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and then we found out it was a complete fabrication. And most of those people still have jobs!

Meanwhile Russia concocts evidence of chemical weapons labs and those same people who believed in WMDs cant fathom how Russians could fall for this shit....

While simultaneously people who rant constantly about "mainstream meadia" claim that because RT broadcast it, that it must be true and can in no way be propaganda.

I don't think anyone has ever said that. Even people who enjoy rt understands who funds it.

I hear it (in the US and Europe) it is something you would hear regularly in Russia - I also hear that "mainstream meadia" constantly lie but Fox News is a beacon of truth, and they too are on "our" side in the fight against the corrupt mainstream media and fake news crisis.

Personally I dont see how anout with more than a single IQ point can hold such a belief honestly in good faith, but clearly plenty do.

Biological; nuland admitted that the US did fund those labs and that they did deal with dangerous viruses, but that they weren't for biological warfare. Either way, the charge has a lot more weight since the us funded labs exist. Biological weapons?? Probably not.. but here is the thing: Meanwhile here in the west, I am reliably told those labs don't exist while Russians are getting ready to use chemical weapons, just like in syria. Except the Russian chemical weapon charges were found to be bogus just like the Syrian ones. This comes AFTER Russian mod warns its people that the US will be attempting to false flag them with another "chemical weapon attack." Who do I believe? The west is at the bottom of that list.

I remember following news during the buildup to that war. It was fairly obvious that those WMD claims was weak, and that was definitely brought up in the news. While I was mostly following European sources, so American sources might have been less insistent on that. But seriously, if your country wants to go to war, and local news sources is the only thing you look at. Then you aren't trying very hard to stay informed, and if you are fortunate enough to speak English, there is so many serious news sources out there with different viewpoints it's crazy. So there is not much of an excuse.

I'm reminded a little bit of a clip[0] in which an AP reporter challenged a State Department official about some of his claims about the Russian plans for a war on Ukraine. It's aged in a weird way, because of course, the war happened - but it does show the weird dynamic at play between journalists, the people, and the state security apparatus.

Essentially, they can't give you the details. Sometimes they lie, for national security, operational security, or even pathological, political reasons.

I guess the one takeaway that's stuck in my mind from this morass is that the people who led us to war in Iraq should have gone to jail. That would have been the only way to maintain the integrity of the security apparatus they misused to trick their nations into going along with it.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4PbCiHOtR8

Did Russia ever stage a false flag operation before their invasion of Ukraine? I don't recall hearing about it.

Depends what exactly you mean by "false flag operation". But South Ossetia seemed to follow much the same playbook as Ukraine.

Russian/orthodox world perspective: whether the west likes it or not, ukraine's illegal coup government went out of its way to oppress Russians all over the country. Azov was on a campaign of war crimes against the east long before the current war: "russia instigated the ethnic Russians in the east to rebel!" Come the cries, but, even if true, our answer is to shrug and say the United States does this all the time. Turn about is fair play. Moreover, the view from Greece and Serbia is that the United States and Europe are causing needless Ukrainian deaths by encouraging them to fight a hopeless war. Western propaganda claims lives in this case.

Just FYI as how the east is looking at this.

> whether the west likes it or not, ukraine's illegal coup government went out of its way to oppress Russians all over the country. Azov was on a campaign of war crimes against the east long before the current war: "russia instigated the ethnic Russians in the east to rebel!" Come the cries, but, even if true, our answer is to shrug and say the United States does this all the time. Turn about is fair play.

Sure, and I think that's why Russia more or less got away with Crimea and Donbas. But this kind of open invasion seems like a different level, something we haven't seen (post-9/11 notwithstanding) since Serbia/Kosovo, and indeed that's the parallel Russia often draws - but the justification for that was a well-documented massacre of civilians. Is that kind of thing evidenced in what the Azov Battalion et al are accused of? (Genuine question, I'm interested to hear what's being said on every side).

False flag operations were very common in Ukraine from both sides of the parties. It was often a war about publicity and perception to get third parties to act.

> Then you aren't trying very hard to stay informed

I don’t disagree with this, but I don’t think the burden should entirely be on us common folk. We are the ones being lied to. We can’t only focus on “staying informed,” it is critical that we start demanding the truth from the institutions we’re supposed to trust. If they don’t change, we need new institutions.

https://www.SpacePowerMonkey.com

I agree we need new and federated institutions — particularly around things like intelligence.

Back then, news was thought to be a counter to government. Government had its power and news told the truth about that power. This turned out to be an illusion and that illusion has been breaking down over the last 20 years, but it's very stubborn. I first remember it during the Clinton / Monica Lewinsky scandal. All the news outlets chose to ignore it. Drudge ended up getting the scoop at which point the news had to cover it. If it weren't for Drudge, it might not have ever come out. This was what, 1996?

There isn't much in the way of alternatives either. When they do pop up, they are coincidentally labeled as "misinformation," and censored.

I am nowhere a supporter of attack on Ukraine, however when I open a reddit page I see 10s of posts in seemingly unrelated subreddits, probably organically upvoted by people angry at Russia and with sympathy towards Ukraine which highlights the brave fight of the small nation. However the skeptic in me feels that a lot of this information is also being orchestrated to the top behind the scenes, which in this case makes the West not too different than Russia.

In Russia if you report the wrong thing you go to prison.

The west is not remotely like Russia in this matter.

Yes, for individuals, it's worse. For accurate information, it's probably a wash, or a close call. There are so many other ways of biasing information streams than overt oppression.

This is nonsense. If the opposing viewpoint can’t even be put across due to the threat of jail time, you only get one. Whatever manipulation you feel occurs in other systems, outright suppression of dissenting opinion is worse, for the individual and for accuracy of information.

Such as social media banning the Hunter Biden story just before the election and suspending the New York Post's account?

Boohoo, the social media companies decided what they wanted published on their platform. I am so oppressed.

No, not such as that, because there are other places you can talk about it and reporters are free to report it in their own publications.

Meanwhile in Russia, mentioning things that go against the official line gets you actually imprisoned for years.

Get a grip. You are not being oppressed. You may need to spend less time consuming social media though, and realise that what facebook or twitter allow is not the whole world, just a noisy subset. You are allowed to post your hunter biden conspiracy theories elsewhere, you can even stand up your own website and post it all there, and the worst that will happen is people will laugh at you. In Russia you are not.

What I really want is to have a setting where I can turn these kinds of filters on and off, or to different/customized priorities.

Search is a tool for me to use: give me better control of the results that I can get. Choosing between different ranking algorithms would be wonderful too, to skip around different SEO strategies

It sounds like you're advocating for pushing censorship responsibility to the user. I agree this would be nice — in fact you could consider uBlock Origin a form of client-side censorship that already exists. In practice, I'm not sure how much adoption such a system would get, if used for censorship purposes. The main problem is the underlying truth that most censorship proponents are not actually pro-censorship of the information _they_ consume — they're pro-censorship of the information _other_ people consume.

Even if you _could_ find a user who wants their client to hide information from them, that user probably doesn't want to filter their own spam, too. By default, the client already expects the server to fulfill a gatekeeping role in filtering (censoring!) spam. In fact, this is how we got here in the first place – we delegated filtering mechanisms to service providers, and now they're simply expanding the filter.

Personally, I'm in favor of a simple but likely effective regulation: Any service that renders a feed of third-party content to the user must default to sorting the feed in reverse chronological order, and must reset all current users to this default on the day the legislation goes into effect. Of course, this only mitigates the feed-based, mostly social-media problem — it doesn't solve the issues with search results (or auto-complete suggestions, for that matter). For search results, a client-based model wouldn't scale, as client preferences need to be evaluated at time of indexing, not when returning results.

> It sounds like you're advocating for pushing censorship responsibility to the user.

It is really irresponsible to be phrasing censorship as a "responsibility". Censorship is a tool of the weak and simple-minded so that they can maintain the illusions of a shared reality promulgated by whoever is in charge. The only responsibility should be towards the free and unadulterated flow of information, and yes, it is the individual's responsibility to make sense of that in a civilized fashion.

My only exception to this rule is for things that are irrelevant to seeker's intent to acquire more information, advertising falls into this bucket.

"My only exception is things I don't like"

How is blocking spam and advertisement materially different than blocking a foreign actor's propaganda?

Blocking spam is done by the consumer of information, blocking a foreign (and domestic) actor's propaganda is done by the entity with the power of dissemination of information.

You don't see Google censoring ads much.

Google spends most of their time blocking ads. "Spam" is ads.

> You don't see Google censoring ads much.

There's nothing in their business they censor more.

In search results?

That is an extremely uncharitable reading of my words

Stopped reading at “censorship responsibility”.

Maybe keep reading then (or configure your censorship software to truncate comments from TechBro8615).

>... feed of third-party content to the user must default to sorting the feed in reverse chronological order, and must reset all current users to this default on the day the legislation goes into effect.

All this does is sort is allow gamification of search results based on the time of creation for the content. The quality of search instantly will go into the dumpster.

> By default, the client already expects the server to fulfill a gatekeeping role in filtering (censoring!) spam.

This is how a lot of email clients currently work, but it is not a fundamental law of the universe. Back in the day, you could run programs on your computer that would filter spam automatically based on criteria and examples you specified. For example, see https://daringfireball.net/2003/09/interview_michael_tsai

The fact that people would pay money for such a program highlights the difference between spam filtering and censorship: spam filtering hides things that I don't want to see, while censorship hides things that other people don't want me to see.

And this is a good reason that cries of censorship on tech platforms often sound naive. Most of us don’t want to be served known disinformation.

I think https://50kft.com/ removes filters from Google, but you may have to change your clock to use it.

This whole Ukraine war teached me a thing I haven't noticed before: I simply can't trust ANY media, search engine, or social network anymore.

It's a sad state of affairs, but since the invasion started my only source of "news" related to the war is a few, and I a said a FEW, Youtube channels.

I'm brazilian and one channel I recommend is Fernando Ulrich's channel. He interviewed (in english) a lot people (ukrainians, russians), commented on the geopolitical causes for the war a month before it started for real etc.

Through his channel I found the lectures by John J Mearsheimer, and that's the only reason I can say that I "understand" what the hell is happening over there.

It's a real shame that a financial advice channel, from a 3rd world country, is the last bastion of thrust I can find in order to get informed about the most important geopolitical event of the last decade. The mainstream media/tech oligopoly are a disgrace to mankind.

I replaced mainstream media with Breaking Points (https://www.youtube.com/c/breakingpoints). I've found them to be far more reliable.

A fellow breaker! :) My go-to news source for context and perspective.

Yikes. Imagine replacing media outlets with a right-wing youtuber and thinking that's far more reliable.

Yikes. Imagine thinking Breaking Points is right-wing.

> I simply can't trust ANY media, search engine, or social network anymore.

No, you can't. It really comes down to a choice of which unhinged violent group of psychopaths do you want to believe.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqKfSbhm6yo This is a great explanation of the anarchist perspective.

Great quote:

"Ukraine has been this mess for many many many years of people arguing about which of authoritarian control freaks should get violently dominate everybody. That is a question that doesn't have a right answer."

Choosing who sociopath to believe is way down the road (and in my opinion not necessary in the end to "believe" anyone, you ideally have your judgement to filter out the noise and get the however little information). The step we still have not gotten past is to be able to listen to all the psychopaths in the first place. At this moment, the psychopath with the most strength near you prohibits other psychopaths from being heard at all.

As the X-Files used to say, Deceive, Inveigle, Obfuscate

Can you please explain it, because I'm very curious what you believe is the truth.

Liberals are trying to cancel Mearsheimer for his views on the causes of this war and his geopolitics in general. So fret not, soon you won't have ANY voice opposing American mainstream opinion.

> I simply can't trust ANY media, search engine, or social network anymore.

It's one of the key goals of Russian information warfare: to create a feeling that you can't tell truth apart from fiction, and to force you into apathy and paralyze you, so you become unable to act and protect your interests. Russians are among the largest pushers of conspiracy theories from Covid to QAnon, and have been for a very long time, because it is cheap and very effective way to divide free societies into infighting groups. NYC station chief of Russian foreign intelligence used to visit public libraries to post conspiracy theories on Geocities in 1990s -- that's how important it was and remains.

They flood all available channels with utter nonsense to make people turn their brains off. Just today a general and the spokesperson for Russians Ministry of Defense tried to justify the war by saying that the United States was training migratory birds in secret Ukrainian laboratories to carry dangerous pathogens into Russia: https://redd.it/tb6sn8 Antivaxx groups have already switched to parroting such crap, because many of them are seeded by Russia.

By the way, Mearsheimer is an idiot and nobody takes him seriously in Eastern Europe. You might as well read books by Nazis explaining why Germans had the right to Lebensraum in the East. Instead of precompiled knowledge provided by TV talking heads or authoritative-appearing "experts", I recommend building up knowledge from basic building blocks. Start by reading general histories of the regions you are interested in to understand historic difficulties that people in those places have faced over the past several centuries and what their current goals and motivations are. Then you don't need Mearsheimers to tell you what's going on, you can derive it from your knowledge. This applies to everything else too. If you know a thing or two about basic statistics, then you're much less likely to fall for bullshit narratives like Covid conspiracy theories from people who look trustworthy. Knowledge is power.

> Mearsheimer is an idiot and nobody takes him seriously in Eastern Europe

Maybe they should have listened to that idiot when he suggested in 1993 that Ukraine retains some of its nuclear weapons to deter Russia from attacking it in the future.

And then what? Or do you mean the Americans should have listened to him? Eastern Europeans can't do anything but react to the USA's prodding in Mearsheimer and the like's view, they're just pawns to be played by the USA vs. the if-then AI known as Russia. The world is a 1 player game, everything that happens is ultimately due to the right or wrong decisions of the Americans

“ It's one of the key goals of Russian information warfare”

were you born yesterday? do you not remember the iraq war? babies in incubators? vietnam? syrian gas attacks? russiagate? qanon? the 2014 ukraine coup? these are all things created by western TLAs. im not gonna read anything else you wrote but i noticed at the bottom you said

“knowledge is power”

wow thanks for that powerful insight!

Wow, thanks for an incredibly boring addition.

Except for Fox News, which breathlessly covered every new possible chemical weapons facility that the US captured, mainstream media pretty quickly concluded that there was no extant chemical weapons program in Iraq after the US entered. Russian media is still pretending that Ukraine is the aggressor, and there is no war.

Still waiting for the war crimes tribunal for the American military + Bush and friends.

There isn't going to be one for Russia either. That doesn't mean that the news media in the US is tightly controlled government propaganda or that the news media in Russia isn't.

> There isn't going to be one for Russia either.

I'm not so sure about this. What makes you believe so?

War crimes tribunals only happen for the loser after they submit to terms.

What makes you believe Russia will not end up losing?

Russia has far more resources than Ukraine, which has no interest in chasing the Russian army into Moscow and getting them to surrender anyway.

I was alive and watching the news back then, and this is bullshit. NYT didn't admit their screw-up until over a year after the war began. [0] I'm not sure CNN ever admitted it. Even worse, every time the previous ridiculous theory of war was exposed as nonsense, they were eager to transfer to the next ridiculous theory: WMDs, Saddam supposedly harboring aQ, fostering democracy, saving the Shiites, saving the women, saving the Kurds, saving the Yazidis, the surge, opposing MaS, opposing ISIS, opposing Iran, opposing corruption, stealing their oil, etc, blah, blah, blah.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/26/world/from-the-editors-th...

I was alive and watching the news, and you're completely wrong about TV news and the NY Times reporting, which freely admitted that Iraq didn't have a chemical weapons program (except for Fox News, which kept reporting that this time we found it without ever reporting that the last time wasn't what they suggested). The only thing that took a while was the apology for believing Bush administration sources in the run-up to the war.

The simple way to show that anyone on TV (besides e.g. "Democracy Now") got it right by a particular date would be to link to a recording or transcript of an example.

Simple. Every single news agency said as much. Here's one from two months after Baghdad was captured. http://www.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/06/09/wmd.controversy/in...

Here's the NY Times less than a month into the invasion noting that no active chemical weapons program had been found and that the administration's words seemed to be shifting about whether they believed it would ever be found: https://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/05/world/a-nation-at-war-ill...

Meanwhile, those who watched Fox News were never told that the earlier finds were not ongoing chemical weapons programs: https://www.politico.com/story/2015/01/poll-republicans-wmds...

> Mearsheimer is an idiot and nobody takes him seriously in Eastern Europe

Because .. you say so? His argumentation stands on its own. Yours on the other hand, doesn't. I suggest you practice what you preach after toning down calling your betters "idiots" and educate yourself.

> It's one of the key goals of Russian information warfare

This was also overtly one of the goals of Trump's political messaging. In the past, American politicians merely hid or distorted unpleasant facts. Trump and his political strategists instead attacked the problem head-on, tapping into populist skepticism and anti-intellectualism in order to promulgate the idea that all truth is relative and that correctness is a matter of opinion.

Of course, all politicians benefit from this state of affairs. Hence all this empty "fact-checking" that actually just exacerbates the problem.

What you say about information warfare is certainly true, but one would be a fool to think only Russia does it.

Controlling opinions is a more terrifying weapon than even atomic bombs, because you can actually make use of it, every day, every minute, and it cannot be that easily regulated.

> It's one of the key goals of Russian information warfare

They seem to have pretty smart people to be able to predict this behavior then. Doesn't mean this behavior should be condoned.

A very related problem is, that people often want to have information that simple doesn't exists or is not obtainable at this moment.

When I worked at a large news site, every time there was a significant event, people flocked to the usual sources immediately demanding answers NOW. Whoever gives any answer first or gives the most spectacular answer, wins. Be that traditional media, social networks, bloggers, politicians etc. Almost nobody cares about the veracity of the information if they feel good about themselves being informed and what they hear sounds right.

There is a ton a valid issues to be talked about when it comes about trustworthiness of different media. But I think also as societies we need to get better at living with ambiguity instead of basically asking to be click-baited constantly.

Sounds like you could just navigate to those sites and skip the search all together?

I've been waffling between whether or not I think this is a good thing. I am curious on your thoughts:

A lot of malicious actors have learned how to game the search ranking algorithms by making carefully crafted lies that are easily spread as truths online quickly. They are able to get their fake news to spread (and this rank higher) in ways that legitimate sources can't.

Most people only ever look at the first page of results when searching for answers, and, let's be honest, take those answers for the truth.

If you were a search engine provider and knew that viral, fake stories were able to do that, wouldn't not taking action also be making a decision about what you can and can't see? Inaction, in this case, would be tacit approval.

Also you can still search for stories about how Russia is presenting the war, but you have to specifically look for it

>Most people only ever look at the first page of results when searching for answers, and, let's be honest, take those answers for the truth.

Do you? The argument I'm hearing is that most people are stupid and those stupid people aren't smart enough to know better, so the smart people need to control their lives to "protect them." I'm not sure if you realize this but this was the same argument used to perpetuate slavery.

Edit: Elaborated my argument.

For most of my search queries, yes?

The vast majority of people, absolutely, yes. I try to always look for alternative sources and look for "all sides" when it comes to news and stuff, but even I will admit 100% that I will not bother going past the first page of search results. If anything I'll make another search with more biased keywords to look for what I am actually interested in, but I'll rarely if ever go past the first page of results. I consider myself to be aware of most online misinformation or tactics and I still fall for this, I'd be surprised if the vast majority of "normal" users would be even more affected by it.

To add for future readers, since the post I was replying to was edited and I can't edit mine anymore, I'm not calling people stupid. The original post was putting into question the fact that most people only read the first page of results, hence my response.

Depends!

If the first page of search engine results about a question contains the answer I wanted to hear (i.e. it confirms my existing biases), I won't often look at page 2.

If the first page "feels wrong" -- like I have a hunch that things are a different way -- I'll read more results or write new queries. I'll also, I would say, 90-95% of the time, consider the possibility that I was wrong. But I'll keep looking for evidence that confirms my own biases, too.

Yeah, I hate to admit it, but unless something in the back of my head makes me suspicious of the information I'm reading, I probably won't go past the first couple results that confirm it.

Have you not experienced an avalanche of friends and family members sending you sketchy videos of dubious provenance? The past two years have illustrated to me that the majority of people are just not equipped to distinguish good and bad sources of information, particularly on the internet. That doesn't make them stupid. It just means they are deficient in the particular skill of distinguishing disinformation campaigns. It's a skill that can be learned but people often don't have the time or inclination to do so. Much in the same way that people will put on FOX or CNN and rely on those news sources because they don't have the time, money, or newsgathering ability to do their own investigative reporting. People end up generally picking sources they trust and then relying on them. But that leaves room for disinformation, especially on online sites where untrained people can let their guard down to bad information that has been unwittingly endorsed by a trusted source, whether a friend, or in this case, a familiar search engine. The reason disinformation/propaganda is ubiquitous online is because it works, and it's cost effective.

As far as slavery goes, that's one hell of a slippery slope. Owning a website and curating the information on it is tantamount to kidnapping people and exercising ownership over them and their children? That's like saying someone who "hurt" your feelings is engaging in literal torture and murder.

> That doesn't make them stupid.

But more often than not their reaction to questioning bad information they have shared is "I'm not stupid! I though someone smart like you would get it. It's not rocket science" ..

I think the idea that this many people have been duped by disinformation campaigns is in bad faith. People wouldn't be seeking alternative sources if they had any reason to trust mainstream corporate media, and the latter has proven themselves deeply untrustworthy given the number of political scandals and manufactured crises they have grossly misrepresented by cheering them on and making it clear that critical thinking around those subjects is verboten.

So of course people are going to seek sources that do not gaslight them and condescendingly hand them down information, expecting them to eat up every bit of it at face value. Corporate media sources aren't encouraging people to ask their own questions, form hypotheses, and investigate further.

On MSNBC's Morning Joe, Mika Brzezinski said herself: "telling the American people what to think is our job".

People HATE that! How arrogant and conceited does one have to be to say something like that with a straight face? She, and the rest of her ilk like Brian Stelter, can get off their high horses and treat people with dignity, and step a level up by encouraging viewers to verify THEIR claims and become their own researchers. Not to mention, CNN has become sex scandal central with their own leadership and staff knowingly neglecting and burying them to damning effect once they've been found later, further dimenishing trust.

One only need look at all the conspiracy theories that have turned out to be 100% true these past 2 years on a myriad of topics; and were called conspiracies strictly in order to silence and control the narrative in a direction that's profitable to the corporate media and other corporations, as they see competing information a threat to their own media and products, respectively.

So I'll finish with this point: give people a break and let them seek alternative information. Chances are, if it's not confirmed or found to be false within 6 months of sharing it, because people in high places lied or slipped up and proved them right, these people will be able to reconcile that. You would be pleasantly surprised how diligent these communities are in spotting their own misinformation and broadcasting those findings freely.

You think I'm arguing in bad faith? That I'm deliberately advancing an argument I know to be untrue? OK, interesting...

Anyway, moving on, I think you make some good points. Absoultely, so-called MSM has gaslighted people on various occasions. But that doesn't disprove the "duped by information campaigns" premise, it supports it. People are distrustful of MSM because they have been successfully deceived in the past. Millions were duped into thinking that the Iraq War was honestly precipitated by weapons of mass distruction not only because they were lied to by the government but because it was aided by passionate support in MSM, notoriously the New York Times.

And I'm not sold on the idea that communities are diligent in spotting their own misinformation. Look how homeopathy and astrology persist, generations after they have been shown to be bunk. In the case of homeopathy, people often seek it out because they feel duped and misled by Big Pharama. And that's a mistake that people make. They are rightfully skeptical of a mainstream idea but then latch on to an even more dubious idea because it seems like arcane truth, the fruit of their own research against the Brzezinski-esque medical establishment telling them what's for their own good. And then, because of the sunk cost fallacy, they hold onto the bad idea far longer than they should, even propagating it like a religion.

"One only need look at all the conspiracy theories that have turned out to be 100% true these past 2 years." What did you have in mind? I can only think of maybe one (non mainstream I presume) conspiracy theory that turned out to be 100% true. Most of the time, and this is key, just because the mainstream theory had flaws doesn't mean any of its concomitant conspiracy theories were 100% correct. In general they aren't, because like cancer cells they lack a control mechanism to keep them from continuously mutating. Plausible election irregularities turn into pallets of ballots, which turn into the ghost of Hugo Chavez owning voting machines, etc.

One of the problems with deciding to eschew mainstream sources of information, is that you often have no way of determining truth value through your own personal experience or expertise. I'm not a physician, epidemiologist or virologist. In order to conclude anything, I have to have faith that data provided by other people is accurate. In the past, unreliable sources of information were naturally lost over time because they got no support. But with SEO, spam, and/or astroturfing, any bit of misinformation can be propagated as broadly as the truth. And people are expected to wade through that and stumble upon the facts? Maybe, but have you heard of Borges' Library of Babel[0]? It's a story describing an infinite library where volumes are printed with random text, so every possible permutation of letters is there. Everything that is true is there, but so is every lie, and every near truth. But because all information is equally available without regard for truth, the library is effectively useless. That's what an entirely uncurated internet becomes.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Library_of_Babel

>Everything that is true is there, but so is every lie, and every near truth. But because all information is equally available without regard for truth, the library is effectively useless. That's what an entirely uncurated internet becomes.

I don't disagree with most of what you said, but I don't think that's a justification for censorship. The non-curated internet did come up with Wikipedia and a lot of great sources. Some of those sources go from great to bad. Do you trust Amazon reviews? I don't but I used to; I think a lot of people feel the same way. Amazon tried to "fix" it by censoring what it felt were bad reviews, but it didn't seem to work.

I think the main disinformation comes from politics, which, by nature is disinformation. I don't think that, to paraphrase, "people believe dumb things," is a good justification for censorship. Think about what passed as truth in 1850 or even 1920. Darwin of course was censored and the Snopes trial are just examples of where any type of censorship, allowed to stand, halts the progress of a civilization.

Good points, honestly. I'll just add that I don't think down-ranking amounts to censorship, rather it seems a good compromise between that and Babel, in that a casual low-information browser won't see known misinformation as a top result, but a more engaged reader can still locate it down the page if they wish.

> I don't disagree with most of what you said, but I don't think that's a justification for censorship.

> I don't think that, to paraphrase, "people believe dumb things," is a good justification for censorship.

You keep saying "censorship". Downweighting disinformation search results is far from censorship; it's just un-gaming the trolls' SEO gaming.

> So of course people are going to seek sources that do not gaslight them and condescendingly hand them down information

And what they find are usually other sources which gaslight them far more, but whose (dis)information they then proselytise as if they've Done Their Own Research and finally Seen The Light.

I'm sorry, but that makes absolutely zero sense. Gaslighting your audience means you, as a publisher of information, openly states to your viewers that they aren't capable of finding credible information themselves, and discerning what's true or false. It's also the process of declaring information as "misinformation" and having your audience prove you wrong over and over again — or through more official processes like Congressional hearings, courts, etc. finding that swaths of information shared by the corporate media was largely false after all.

It's telling intelligent people they are less capable than they really are. Truly, no one can make that suggestion without some level of hubris and high-horsed thinking, undeserving of anyone's attention.

Again, these are valid reasons why so many people do no trust our institutions responsible for conveying accurate information with as little bias as possible, which barely exists today, and thus independent journalism has quite successfully taken their place, and as a result, corporate media giants attack these lesser sources as their viewers and ratings observably and objectively plummet (as reported).

> I'm sorry, but that makes absolutely zero sense.

Not to you, perhaps, but it looks to me like this is because you have a weird definition of gaslighting.

> Gaslighting your audience means you, as a publisher of information, openly states to your viewers that they aren't capable of finding credible information themselves, and discerning what's true or false.

No. As I've understood it, the whole idea is not to say that openly, but only to imply it, so your audience (=victim) comes to the erroneous conclusion that yours is the only "truth" they can trust on their own.

> It's also the process of declaring information as "misinformation" and having your audience prove you wrong over and over again — or through more official processes like Congressional hearings, courts, etc. finding that swaths of information shared by the corporate media was largely false after all.

Huh? That's "the process of" gaslighting?!? No, that has absolutely fuck-all to do with it, AFAIK. Pretty sure Hitchcock wouldn't have the faintest idea WTF you're on about. I, OTOH, (unfortunately) do have all too good an idea of what this rant means: That you are yourself thoroughly gaslighted -- or fully brainwashed -- by stark raving MAGAhats.

What I understood from the parent's comment is not that they were equating curating a website and slavery, but more so equating the tactics used. There was more than likely a better example to be used so it couldn't be cherry picked, but their point still makes a lot of sense to me regardless.

Full disclosure. I grew up in the days when the internet was the wild west and absolutely loved it, so I may be a bit biased :)

Not the tactics used, but the mindset and thinking. They stupid sheep, us good smart folk must herd them.

>As far as slavery goes, that's one hell of a slippery slope. Owning a website and curating the information on it is tantamount to kidnapping people and exercising ownership over them and their children? That's like saying someone who "hurt" your feelings is engaging in literal torture and murder.

Ah, but I was comparing the justification to perpetuate said institutions, not the pain inflicted of the institutions themselves; there's big difference. Perhaps you're right, you shouldn't be allowed to process information as you see fit.

> Perhaps you're right, you shouldn't be allowed to process information as you see fit.

Most places in the world, you're not allowed to own or use weapons as you see fit.

Information is weaponized nowadays.

> The argument I'm hearing is that most people are stupid and those stupid people aren't smart enough to know better

Yup, exactly. And that argument is correct.

> this was the same argument used to perpetuate slavery.

> Edit: Elaborated my argument.

No, created a huge strawman.

Who do you think is smart enough to decide what the plebs should be allowed to hear and see? You?

Any engineer who is as smart as the SEO-gaming trolls spreading disinformation from the RNC or the St Petersburg "Factory", and can write search engine rules to undo theirs.

And the "plebs" would still "be allowed to hear and see" the fake news; un-gaming the Troll SEO will just put their dreck down on the eighth page of search results where it belongs, in stead of the first. (Well, "will"... Easily could, if it gets implemented that way. Which is all at least I would ask of the search engines.)

While you’re waffling

> If you were a search engine provider and knew that viral, fake stories

How does the search engine company know whether something is true or not?

The same way our esteemed fact checkers are unsure if being part of a bombing organization and getting convicted for possession of hundreds of pounds of explosives merits calling the person a terrorist.

It's at the core of Google algorithm: page rank. It uses 'trust'.

That actually maps to how we work as a society.

We cannot be experts in everything, we do not have the time, ability, wherewithal.

So we 'trust' certain sources: Teachers, Doctors, Lawyers, Judges, Police, more than we do others i.e. criminals, sources of gossip, arbitrary people.

This is why when people form those institutions fail us, it's a much bigger problem than otherwise. We should fire a teacher for teaching things that are wrong, but we don't worry about the guy walking down the street spouting nonsense.

Over time, we learn who to trust, and also the ways in which we can trust them. 'Nature' has a lot of credibility in some ways, but it also doesn't mean they are always right, and, when it comes to softer issue, they can be politicised.

Judges have more integrity than the average person, but they can also be biased.

The NYT is a good source of information, but it depends if it's 'straight news or opinion'.

Putin has a 'propaganda Army' of people trying to convince people of certain things, much of which are not true. People around the world will believe it if they are exposed to enough of it.

The Russian and Cheese population apparently are willing to believe that UKR government is a bunch of 'Nazis and Drug Dealers'. Which is perverse.

'Information Reputation' is a really big deal and the only way it will work as a society is if we give the 'Conch' to those with greater credibility, otherwise, people will believe in 'whatever'. You can tell people almost anything and 30% of them will believe it if they want to, which is enough people to tilt the needle on so many issues.

Cool but who determines trust scores?

Is it hard to determine the difference between The National Enquirer and Nature?

Bias and lack of integrity is not actually very hard to spot.

It's ultimately nuanced, but it's not rocket science.

The challenge is not really with institutions, there are not that many of them, but rather with social media, individuals, commenters, state actors posing as 'regular people' etc..

> Is it hard to determine the difference between The National Enquirer and Nature?

Try Fox News vs New York Times.

> It's ultimately nuanced, but it's not rocket science. The challenge is not really with institutions, there are not that many of them, but rather with social media, individuals, commenters, state actors posing as 'regular people' etc..

Scoring how much you trust an entity to determine the truthfulness of information they are generating is flawed.

In no way does this properly verify information’s truthfulness in and of itself.

Even scoring “Information.Source.Trust Score”, which is just a single aspect of information, is still far more difficult to do than you apparently realize. How can a human build such a score with no bias?

Truthiness and bias are different.

Also, 'editorial' vs. 'news' are actually different categories and we know what they are.

'Fox 5' - their evening show is pure gossip and innuendo - it has nothing to do with reality or the truth. Their nighthime 'personalities' are editorialists. But they do have regular news segments as well.

All of that can be categorised.

Also, the source of their bias can be roughly identified. Mostly they are a corporate entity playing to an American audience. They have some relationship with the White House on some occasions.

We can delineate.

Because it's a fairly established institution, we can also look at the other kinds of bias. And of course, each personality is different.

They are not owned and controlled by the Kremlin, or the Canadian Government as is, the CBC for example. We can delineate there.

It's really not that hard.

And FYI it's not as though there is hard censorship - you can retrieve Putins' own 'Mein Kamp-ish' rants any time with fairly easy searches.

What we don't want is bad misinformation seeping into the top of arbitrary searches etc..

If someone wants to read 'My Pillow Guy' that's fine, but his opinion on Putin is not going to come up up first when I search 'Putin', unless there's some other, factual, direct relevance.

> If someone wants to read 'My Pillow Guy' that's fine, but his opinion on Putin is not going to come up up first when I search 'Putin', unless there's some other, factual, direct relevance.

Not for you, perhaps, and probably not on DDG (the original subject here). But AIUI the Google algorithm takes into account not only your actual search terms, but your browsing and search histories. So if you're a poor deluded MAGA dupe who's read too much of Mr. Lindell's rants before, it seems utterly plausible to me that at least Google would be only too happy to feed you more of his ravings. And it feels quite likely that Bing, f. ex, would work the same.

> The NYT is a good source of information, but it depends if it's 'straight news or opinion'.

Is this that same newspaper that was one of the primary cheerleaders for the US invasion of Iraq?

Does your email provider filter spam?

> "silencing the competition"

Hyperbole much?

Putting known-bad information sources further down the result list is hardly silencing the competition, in fact it's likely making the results a lot better for the majority of users.

> What if I'm genuinely curious as to how the Russian media is presenting this war?

Then I imagine you can search for that and find it just fine.

> They must have access to this perfect knowledge if they are fit to decide which news sources are "correct"!

Then search rankings are all wrong, from the very concept of such things upwards, because they all seek to rank information quality in various ways, and you should never use them. Any of them.

Honestly these reactions are ridiculous.

If you want a dose of flip flop, now services which banned calls for violence, in a very odd about face, will allow calls for violence against Russians. Sure, yes, the guys and gals calling the shots are baddies, but your everyday Ivan and Katia are not.

So you know the whole thing is not principled but rather political.

>will allow calls for violence against Russians. Sure, yes, the guys and gals calling the shots are baddies, but your everyday Ivan and Katia are not

FB seems to be pretty clear that the calls for violence are allowed only in the context of the Ukrainian war and only against invading forces plus Putin himself.

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/exclusive-facebook-inst...

So now we can petition calls for violence against people who do some people some sort of harm...

Next time we, the US, for good or bad reasons invade some place, can now those affected use FB to call for violence against us? What about allowing us to make calls for violence against them, if we think them so bad we must invade them, let's say North Korea? Or, why not? Can Uighurs call for violence against Chinese? We can come up with lots of examples, People in the Tigray against Ethiopians?

It's not just allowing calls for violence against Putin or his generals and conscripts...

It's BS.

Should DDG show flat earth websites on basic searches about the earth?

That’s not about silencing the competition that’s about doing the basic functions you’re looking for in a search engine. Delisting would be another story as people may legitimately want to find flat earth content, but this isn’t delisting the content is still there you just need to specifically look for it.

> Should DDG show flat earth websites on basic searches about the earth?

It should if that's what their unbiased parameters bubble up. What's bs is hardcoded censorship/downranking of searches based on (geo)political ideology of the ddg owners.

If their unbiased parameters give useless spam, users would expect the parameters to change.

Agreed, but I feel that is unlikely to be connected to a particular political ideology.

Since flat earth theories never posed any relevant problem, this is just a straw man to justify propaganda mechanisms.

Flat earth, anti vax groups, and national national governments running disinformation campaigns are all doing the exact same thing.

At some point you have to filter out the spam. Otherwise you just get garbage.

Let's also be honest: most of us who follow and comment on HN aren't the average Joe.

Most of us have a STEM background, a critical spirit forged by scientific method, we usually don't forge an opinion after reading a single source, and most of us know how to (at least roughly) estimate the trustworthiness of online content, based on simple factors - how clickbait is the title? what sources are cited? how many ads and invites to join Telegram channels are on the page? how is the weight balanced between facts and opinions?

So some of us may rightfully feel insulted when tech players like DDG decide to take down disinformation or rank it down. We don't like being babysitted, we feel that we're smart enough to read content from multiple sources and apply our discernment to come up with a reasonable synthesis. We don't like it when somebody puts the garbage out of our sight, because we may be curious to investigate that garbage.

The average Joe out there, however, doesn't have such skills. The average Joe isn't yet used to the bombardment of information of the 21st century. The average Joe still reads a headline without reading the content, because they went within a couple of years from following 1-2 news channels to being bombarded by algorithmic-curated infinite timelines and search results, and they don't know how to process it all. And, if the headline resonates enough with his/her biases, they reshare it blindly. The average Joe won't collect data from Statista to figure out how economic and political metrics shape events. The average Joe wants somebody who does the synthesis work for them and distills information into a headline that they can easily grab. I know this well because it's what most of my family contacts do.

And disinformation players know this quite well. They have figured out how ranking algorithms work, they know how to craft content in a way that it gets viral, and they know the SEO rudiments well enough to push it up in the search results.

So keep in mind that such measures aren't taken for people like us, but for the majority of people out there that are much more vulnerable than us to disinformation and to its psychological tricks. When I look at things from this perspective, I am grateful for tech players who take actions like these. After all, if I want to dig enough I can still find the "Russian perspective", and I can still analyze it and/or debunk it. But I'm happy that the average Joe doesn't have to be exposed to this sh*t anymore.

The only downside of such measures is the usual one when you implement any form of arbitrary information filtering/ranking: disinformation won't go away, it'll just go deeper underground, where it's harder to monitor. This is already the case: lots of false beliefs held by my family and acquaintances don't come from content published on websites, but content shared on Telegram groups (often involving deep fake videos, snippets from movies and music videos repackaged as memes about real war events, videos of Putin speeches with completely wrong subtitles, and so on). It's easier for a fact checker to monitor disinformation openly published on the web rather than on a myriad of chat groups. And I don't think that anybody has a solution for this problem yet.

Search results have to be "biased" towards being related to your query to be useful, I would argue that state sponsored Russian propaganda is probably not particularly related to most queries.

How about state sponsored Chinese propaganda? Or how about state sponsored New Zealand propaganda? Or state sponsored German propaganda? How about a corporation XYZ sponsored propaganda? What if you are Russian, Chinese, Kiwi, German or XYZ employee in these situations - or simply want to have equal access to information so you can make up your own world view?

If you choose to go down this path - what propaganda is OK to be relevant to most queries and who is supposed to be the judge of that?

The problem discussed here is not of search quality bias nature, but of political bias nature which should not have a place in a general web search engine.

Hrm. I always wonder in these situations, what about the slippery slope in the opposite direction? "Political bias" is not a well-defined term; different people have different opinions about what topics are political and about what counts as bias.

So let's say that DuckDuckGo commits to not doing any filtering or sorting based on a nebulous term like "politics". If you choose to go down that path - what concepts are political and who is supposed to be the judge of that?

It seems to me that in order to have any web search engine of any real use, we necessarily have to accept that we are on some level ranking facts based on how relevant they are to queries, and we have to accept that we're going to try and strike a balance between neutrality and usefulness, and that different people/engines will have different ideas about what that balance is. Of course it would be better if consumers had more choices about different search engines to use in situations where they feel the rankings are bad, but... is it necessarily DuckDuckGo's fault that there aren't more search engines?

A search engine should have ranking factors that tie to the end goal of providing the most relevant results to their users.

However this decision is about unilaterally down-ranking a subset of results because of the political view expressed on them (if it was about misinformation than surely they would want to down-rank all misinformation equally - if they had capability to do so in the first place).

This is at the same level of absurdity from a search engine user perspective as would downranking sites because their tld is .net or because they are in italian language.

> if it was about misinformation than surely they would want to down-rank all misinformation equally - if they had capability to do so in the first place

They don't have that capability. DuckDuckGo also doesn't have the capability to surface only correct JS code when I search for a programming concept. There isn't a binary here, all manual upranking and downranking of any content is always playing whack-a-mole, none of it is systemic or equally applied -- that's why it's manual and not automatic.

DuckDuckGo tries to strike a balance between manually downranking misinformation that is obviously wrong, while being careful about downranking in less clear-cut situations. It is justifiable to critique them in whether or not they've done a good job of that, and it is definitely justifiable to ask about why they don't apply the same standards to certain other propaganda sources. But that's not how I originally read your comment: "The problem discussed here is not of search quality bias nature, but of political bias nature which should not have a place in a general web search engine."

There's a big difference between saying that a specific search engine isn't doing a good job of stamping out all misinformation, or that it's being very selective about which misinformation it cares about, and saying that political content should be immune from ranking systems.

----

> This is at the same level of absurdity from a search engine user perspective as would downranking sites because their tld is .net or because they are in italian language.

You know that most search engines downrank non-English-language sources for you if you're located in America, right? They try to return results in languages that you're likely to be able to read.

And search engines don't base rankings off of tlds because that would be trivial for adversaries to take advantage of by switching to upranked tlds. It's not at all comparable to deciding to downrank a news source.

> It is justifiable to critique them in whether or not they've done a good job of that,

If the announcement said "all disinformation about Russian-Ukraine conflict" it would grant benefit of a doubt about their execution as you point out. But it says "Russian disinformation" thus they are making it about politics (something a search engine should not be doing), not fighting disinformation (something a search engine should be doing), so we are justified to critique them on that basis.

> You know that most search engines downrank non-English-language sources for you if you're located in America, right? They try to return results in languages that you're likely to be able to read.

Correct. Because they can rightfully infer that the user is searching in english and likely wants results in english. However in this case, they are inferring a certain political view of the conflict, regardless of what your intent is (what if you are a Russian or Chinese DDG user, or simply someone who is agnostic and wants to read what all sides have to say to form a world view?). No basis for inference can be established here. The only way this could work is by having a switch in the interface to turn such results off, so the user can opt in into it if they prefer to.

> But it says "Russian disinformation" thus they are making it about politics

I don't follow. What specifically do you mean when you say the word "politics"? Do you mean that targeting a specific source of misinformation is political? That's literally all manual interventions, all of them target specific sources.

> However in this case, they are inferring a certain political view of the conflict, regardless of what your intent is

Well, or they're inferring that the information is factually wrong. Again, just very confused at what you mean by political here. When DuckDuckGo uses the word misinformation, what it means by that word is that DuckDuckGo thinks the information is factually incorrect, regardless of whether you are Russian or Chinese or American.

If the DOJ comes out against encryption and says that it has a special chip that's safe enough for everyone, and then a researcher says, "no, I have broken the chip" -- is that a political disagreement? If I block the DOJ source am I making a political statement, or am I saying that the DOJ's assertion in this case is factually wrong?

Of course, sorting facts often has political implications, and it is fair to ask about what the political implications and viewpoints are that DuckDuckGo has, and whether it has biases that prevent it from reacting as strongly to, just as an example, US propaganda about refugees or armed conflicts that it has initiated. However, once again, asking critical questions about bias is not the same thing as saying that there is a nebulous category called "politics" where a private company who's job it is to sort information should never sort information.

> No basis for inference can be established here. The only way this could work is by having a switch in the interface to turn such results off, so the user can opt in into it if they prefer to.

It's hard to argue about this because on one hand, having more user controls around search would genuinely be good. However, this is not really how search works right now outside of rare situations like safe-search and location, and to argue that DuckDuckGo shouldn't be making any editorial decisions about political topics until full user-transparent customization of search algorithms exist -- it's effectively the same thing as arguing that no editorial decisions should be made right now.

To me, this just kind of circles back around to what I was originally saying. Are you upset about a result-sorting business doing its job and sorting results, or are you upset with this very specific decision, or... is it possible you're just upset that we don't have a more competitive market for search engines?

> Do you mean that targeting a specific source of misinformation is political?

In this particular case yes, proven by the fact that such source can only be 'Russian' by their definition.

> Well, or they're inferring that the information is factually wrong.

How would DDG do this even if they wanted? Send fact checkers to the ground?

> When DuckDuckGo uses the word misinformation, what it means by that word is that DuckDuckGo thinks the information is factually incorrect, regardless of whether you are Russian or Chinese or American.

I agree with the last part. The problem here is they are only expressing the intent to flag disinformation from one side as factually incorrect, and do not even bother to do so for disinformation coming from the other side, thus creating bias, which is political in nature for the reasons explained above.

> To me, this just kind of circles back around to what I was originally saying. Are you upset about a result-sorting business doing its job and sorting results, or are you upset with this very specific decision, or... is it possible you're just upset that we don't have a more competitive market for search engines?

Not upset at all, does my tone give out a different vibe? Sorry for that.

> How would DDG do this even if they wanted? Send fact checkers to the ground?

If you want DDG to independently verify every decision it makes via primary sources, you are going to get less useful search results. DuckDuckGo doesn't have a team of scientists to reproduce every research paper they see. Nevertheless, they can decide to intervene in situations where they are reasonably certain that a source isn't trustworthy.

Of course, people are free to disagree with them. Is the disagreement here that people think they're blocking sites that aren't misinformation? That's difficult to debate given that we don't know the list of sites, but my personal priors are that the sites probably aren't the victims of smear-campaigns, they probably are peddling deliberate misinformation. Hard to debate one way or another if we don't know the list; but once again, arguing that DuckDuckGo is wrong about whether these sources are trustworthy is not the same as saying that they shouldn't be able to downrank a bad news source without first forming their own team of investigative journalists.

----

> I agree. The problem here is they are only flagging disinformation from one side as factually incorrect, and do not even bother to do so for disinformation coming from the other side, thus creating bias, which is political in nature for the reasons explained above.

So, there's two things here:

First, yes, search engines have bias for the same reason that all ranking systems have bias. Remember that DuckDuckGo is literally in the business of ranking certain sites above other sites. There is no one in the world and no algorithm that is capable of ranking information without incorporating some degree of worldview into that decision about how rankings should work. This bias is why we use search engines, and it's why diversity in search engines would be a good thing. We want sorting systems to have opinions about how information should be sorted.

This is still very difficult to talk about when the word "political" is being used in such a broad sense. Do you mean political in the sense that all editorial decisions are political by nature because they either reinforce or question a status quo? Or do you mean political in a more narrow way -- that applying more strict standards to a subgroup of sources is the thing that makes this political? If you mean "political" in a broad sense, then sure, I agree, but also there's no such thing as a web search engine that is apolitical in that broad sense and I question whether it's possible to build one that is apolitical without also being completely useless for most users. If you mean political in the second sense, that there is a narrow category of political topics and the lack of fairness is the thing that makes it political... again, I just don't understand how you square that with the regular filtering that search engines do all the time.

When Google Ads pay special attention to ads for lockpickers because it's a popular spam category of ad, but they don't pay special attention to other ads to the same degree, is that suddenly political?

Second issue I have here, if the problem is a lack of flagging misinformation in other contexts, why would the answer not be more rigorous flagging of that misinformation? Why would the answer necessarily be that DuckDuckGo results should be a free-for-all whenever someone searches for the word Ukraine? There's a big jump here from, "I think they're not doing a thorough enough job and I think they're taking sides in a conflict" to "they shouldn't be even trying to do this at all".

There are some services where that viewpoint makes sense, but I don't see how DDG is one of them. I personally have argued that companies like Cloudflare fundamentally shouldn't be in the business of releasing content filters at all. I personally have argued that TLDs shouldn't be involved in censorship. I have personally argued that ISPs should not be allowed to filter content that is not illegal. Important difference, none of those are companies whose primary service is sorting content, none of them are companies that we go to with the explicit request for them to give us information based on what they think is relevant and accurate.

How do you make the jump from disapproval of DDG's standard for misinformation and how it's applied to the idea that they shouldn't be involved in filtering of misinformation at all?

----

TLDR, I still don't really understand why editorial decisions about political content is a slippery slope, but abandoning editorial decisions based on a word ("political") that doesn't seem particularly rigorously defined isn't also a slippery slope.

> How do you make the jump from disapproval of DDG's standard for misinformation and how it's applied to the idea that they shouldn't be involved in filtering of misinformation at all?

It is quite easy to disapprove their current standard on record because according to it, misinformation can be coming from a "Russian" source only and we all know there is much more misinformation in the world than that. Can we agree on this?

I am not saying that a search engine shouldn't be involved in filtering of misinformation. On the contrary, I think that DDG (and any other search engine) should absolutely be in the business of filtering all misinformation they can. Key here is "all".

But by being selective, and in this case based on a particular political view (and I use the word political in the context of world politics), introduces a bias which may negatively affect its users, without any particular benefit.

Makes sense?

Sure. I think it's reasonable to ask DuckDuckGo to apply more rigorous standards across the board.

I'll offer a weak note in their defense that I suspect part of the reason they don't is specifically to avoid sliding down a slippery slope and breaking this balance between neutrality and editorial decisions about content. I suspect that DuckDuckGo would say that there is a volume and kind of misinformation happening here that they are willing to address, but that applying the standards too broadly would result in them making decisions in other contexts where they feel less confident and in pushing their editorial line too far.

However, I don't think it's unreasonable at all to disagree with them on that assessment, and I think it's extremely reasonable to ask why DuckDuckGo feels safer about downranking certain kinds of misinformation and feels nervous about taking stances about other misinformation.

My hope is that if it's somehow possible for anything positive at all to come out of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, it's in part that people become more conscientious and critical about other conflicts (and narratives about conflicts) that we tend to take for granted or ignore.

> However, I don't think it's unreasonable at all to disagree with them on that assessment, and I think it's extremely reasonable to ask why DuckDuckGo feels safer about downranking certain kinds of misinformation and feels nervous about taking stances about other misinformation.

It may look like that on a first glance, but assuming even spread of 100M DDG users, those users from Russia, China, India, Indonesia, Middle east may be more sensitive to other kind (in this case western media) of misinformation.

Since this is easily half of the world population I would argue that stance they took could also be easily seen as an 'extremely unreasonable' at the same time.

Erm. Quite possibly my fault for chaining too many modifiers together, but I'm not sure you read my comment correctly.

> whether it has biases that prevent it from reacting as strongly to, just as an example, US propaganda about refugees or armed conflicts that it has initiated.

> When we talk about misinformation, it is not misinformation to say that Russia unjustly invaded Ukraine.

Wording is a funny thing.

"search engines don't base rankings off of tlds"

Of course they do. By country: so .ca will rank better in Canada$and .in India by domain rank .com ranks higher than .biz

Yep, fair point, you're probably right about that. I was thinking more TLDs like .net vs .com and forgot about the regional side of things, even though I had just mentioned it for ranking based on language.

I guess on that note, I also vaguely remember that .com/.net differentiation was something that people tried in various contexts (not sure if searching was one of them) before we all figured out, "wait, this doesn't mean anything about quality other than which one you chose to buy."

You're right. Fundamentally, there is no unbiased search engine. Ranking results by definition innately creates a bias.

(To be a pedant on my own post: I guess you could do a search engine that collates all search results relating to a keyword and then just shows you a random one first, but I doubt that's what the people want).

The source and purpose of the bias matters for a search engine. One thing to be biased against duplicate content and stuffed keywords, another thing is to have bias against blue widgets because the CEO of the company does not like blue widgets.

flat-earthers would probably also feel they're being unfairly downranked because "the CEO does not like flat-earthers", however. Factual untruth is a good reason for a result to be considered low-relevance to a tangentially related search.

The correct analogy in this case would be if there were both 'square earthers' and 'flat earthers' and DDG decides to penalize only results from 'flat earthers'. Both sides produce factual untruth but only one gets penalized.

I do want to interject here: there is propaganda coming out of all sides during this war, that is unequivocally true. However, it is also unequivocally true that some of the issues/narratives here are not both-sides-are-equally-wrong issues. Russia didn't invade Ukraine to get rid of nazi influence, for example. This is not a territory dispute, it's an unjustified invasion.

I want to be careful while we're talking about misinformation to be clear that there is a difference between wartime propaganda (which is still misinformation) and narratives about why Russia invaded in the first place -- the second category is not a debate where every side is equally guilty of misinformation, Russia is a clear aggressor in this conflict.

That being said, of course Russia and Ukraine are both engaged in propaganda around the current status of their troops, how the war is going, etc...

Who has higher moral ground in a human conflict should be irrelevant from a standpoint of a general purpose web search engine, which DDG used to be.

The moment it starts to openly prefer one kind of misinformation to other, it is basically stopping to be a general purpose web search engine (optimizing for search quality) and starts being a publisher with an agenda (optimizing in this case for a political outcome), becoming a part of the propaganda itself.

Having said that, some DDG users may be fine with this, but many aren't obviously. And I am afraid that those that are fine with it now, are likely to be fine only until the exact same process is used against them, their own interest or political/idealogical/religious beliefs in the future, which in the case of DDG is now a matter of when, because a precedent has been set with this.

Again, just want to be clear here:

> The moment it starts to openly prefer one kind of misinformation to other

When we talk about misinformation, it is not misinformation to say that Russia unjustly invaded Ukraine.

I think it's really important to clarify exactly what kind of misinformation we're talking about, because the Ukrainian narrative that Russia invaded for its own personal interests and not because of a territory dispute or to stamp out racism -- that narrative is not just another side of propaganda, it is the correct reading of the situation.

If you're talking about wartime propaganda like how many tanks have been lost, or about staged photos with prisoners, or whatever -- sure, that's propaganda that comes out of both sides. But that Russia invaded a country unjustly and is committing war crimes against it -- that is not propaganda, it's just the truth.

If you're upset that DuckDuckGo isn't treating both Russia/Ukraine's story about the cause of the war equally, then frankly, they shouldn't be treating them equally, because that's not a matter of opinion or something that needs to be tailored to the user -- regardless of who's using the engine and where they're located.

----

> Who has higher moral ground in a human conflict should be irrelevant from a standpoint of a general purpose web search engine, which DDG used to be.

There's a weird amount of conflation here between:

- moral judgements

- narrative about facts and conclusions drawn from facts

- factually incorrect claims

People can debate about the first two categories there and how search engines should respond to them, and we don't know exactly which sites DDG is looking at downranking or what their policies are for when they downrank a site. But if they are targeting the last category and if they are targeting outright lies about the cause of a conflict, then that would absolutely be something that's reasonable for a general-purpose search engine to do.

It's hard to debate about which category they're targeting if we don't know what the sites are (that in itself might be a criticism of the policy). But, still very important to understand that those three categories above are not all the same thing and not all of them should be dealt with in the same way.

It's called psychological warfare, what Putin is doing.

And you're asking for an enemy state to be allowed to do that warfare, against Ukraine, Europe, the US, unhindered.

This is not comparable to a company tricking people in buying more of their pointless stuff.

> but of political bias nature

No, what you're saying, would help a dictator that attacks another country.

The same could be said of the US, especially since the NDAA made it legal for the government to use propaganda on the domestic population.

The US is not currently invading Canada and bombing Toronto.

State-sponsored American propaganda during the War on Terror is pretty routinely denounced now as incorrect to what was going on, but during the active days would have been ranked higher in results in search engines, had this kind of thing been more popular then.

(I say that as a former neocon too.)

If people started using the word 'false' instead of disinformation I think the distinction would be clearer.

We aren't talking about good results versus bad results here surely? When did bias come into it? Merely falsehoods versus truths? Or have we got to the point where no one actually believes in such anymore and it depends on your political opinion on whether something is true or false?

Fact or fiction. Let your political direction decide.

Surely removing fictious results should be a bonus for everyone?

I give up. World has gone pure stone mad.

Even before that it was just a bing.com fronted. Now it is a censored bing.com frontend lol.

That comment shouldn't have aged well one nanosecond after it was posted.

Search results are bias. The entire idea of a "search engine" is to bias the set of all possible data in the crawled universe to select for the information you're searching for, then sort that information by "likeliest to be what you wanted" because the interface can't just cram all the results straight into your brain.

... and the company writing the search engine is always the final arbiter of what that means in implementation.

In this specific case, DDG is announcing they are aware of some sites where the information is likely to be untrue and they're downranking it on account of it being a datasource unlikely to deliver what the user wants. That's their job, in exactly the same sense that it's their job to figure out that when I search for "hacker news" I mean this site and not the r/hackernews Reddit mirror.

The entire quote in context:

> “[W]hen you search, you expect unbiased results, but that’s not what you get on Google,” Gabriel Weinberg, founder of DuckDuckGo, a privacy-focused search engine, writes on Quora. “On Google, you get results tailored to what they think you’re likely to click on, based on the data profile they’ve built on you over time.”

"Unbiased" is a bad word to use, but what they were getting at is that Google tailors search results per-person based on a data profile. I don't see how anyone even at the time thought that this meant that DuckDuckGo was not ranking sites, that's what a search engine does.

I genuinely don't understand the controversy at all about this. "Who determines what is misinformation" is an argument for search engine diversity, not for destroying the entire concept of a search engine. Of course DuckDuckGo downranks and upranks sites.

The real controversy here is why after all of these years they still haven't gotten around to downranking W3Schools.

I assume it's the "law of conservation of expertsexchange."

They don't downrank w3schools because something will just replace it. ;)

I still can't read that site name as anything but "expert sex change".

Funny how most of the comments here are complaining about how this proves there is western media bias.

One of the main goals of the current Russian propaganda push in the US is to get people to lose confidence in reliable news outlets. They want us to believe that our best news outlets are equivalent to their basement troll farms that just fabricate stories day in and out.

The two are not the same.

Giving equal per story weight to misinformation spammers is equivalent to letting those spammers censor the rest of the media. Is that really what you want duck duck go and other western sites to do?

>One of the main goals of the current Russian propaganda push in the US is to get people to lose confidence in reliable news outlets.

If western news outlets focused a little more on actually being reliable and objective maybe people wouldnt lose confidence.

I hardly think Russian propaganda is required for people to do this.

True, but "not great" is different than "maliciously bad".

Western news is a lot worse than "not great".

Out of curiosity, what are the reliable news outlets that you subscribe to?

Good question. I tend to read primary sources when possible. Propublica isn't bad. Outlets that syndicate them are often good.

Also, organizations that still have journalists on staff, and win awards such as the Pulitzer Prize are a good bet.

Edit: https://www.pulitzer.org/prize-winners-by-year/2021

Western media helped start a war with Irak based on fake weapons of mass destruction.

If people lost trust on Western medias, it's not because of Russians, it's because we are constantly producing propaganda as well. It's just different.

The western media is not a monolith. Fox News was the primary source running the fake WMD story, and is the only mainstream outlet running pro Russian opinion pieces.

They're also foreign owned, and promote policies that would prevent people from voting, allow counts to be ignored.

Since they're Australian, they're not even geographically "western".

Woah woah woah ... woah

Fox News, and stylized in all caps, is an American multinational conservative cable news television channel based in New York City.[2][3][4] It is owned by Fox News Media, which itself is owned by the Fox Corporation.[5]

Fox Corporation (stylized in all-caps as FOX Corporation)[5] is a publicly traded American mass media company operated and controlled by media mogul Rupert Murdoch and headquartered at 1211 Avenue of the Americas in New York City. Incorporated in Delaware, it was formed in 2019 as a result of the acquisition of 21st Century Fox by The Walt Disney Company

-- We Australians call it an American company, you can't put this one on us!

The WMD scandal was recorded live during Colin Powell at a UN conference. It was broadcast by pretty much all American news outlet.

The only difference between the US and Russia is the the US is a lot more subtle when it comes to generating propaganda.

DDG's ranking algorithm is under attack, and they're acting in defense of it.

Nothing more, nothing less. To think there's some objective "unbiased" search result is naive.

Seems consistent to me.

As the Substack folks said: we do not have a misinformation problem, we have a trust problem.

Im still against censorship but covid showed me that there are people who believe anything. :/

You can change entire elections this way, by controlling what propaganda is ok and what isn't. But make no mistake, its actually all propaganda.

Exactly. This people never realize this:

1. Who will decide what is truth or not. 2. Who will be arbiter

With this decision, they join the club with Google and the rest.

I like DDG, but honestly, this is a really bad move. It is already harder for me to find certain sites in the rankings. I mean look at this, even searching for "drudge" doesn't even bring up a link to Drudge Report: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=drudge&t=h_&ia=web

I liked DDG because it respected the user. Limiting what I can see in order to make sure I don't see "Russian disinformation" seems to me like the exact opposite of respecting the user. Will be uninstalling soon if this intensifies.

Drudge was literally the first link in my results. Haha.

Weird. Maybe I got unlucky with some experiment rollout. My top links are Drudge Retort (some stupid parody), the link to the Drudge app on iPhone, and the dictionary definition for "drudge". Nowhere on the page is there an actual link to the site for me.

I clicked on that link for "drudge", the search results vary every time I reload the page. I always get the iOS app, the retort parody, and the dictionary definition as the top 3. But the position of all 3 links vary every time I click reload.

Still don't see the link to the actual site either.

For the last couple years, I think the Drudge Report itself has actually been a parody of the Drudge Report.

I like Drudge as an aggregator, it's a great way to see a "full picture" of what is going on in the world. But I do have some major gripes, the main one being that he routinely links to dog shit sources like DailyMail, The Sun, etc. That crap isn't news and I wish I could just remove all links to it from Drudge and Google results forever.

It was sold with an nda.

So is mine. But that seems accurate to me. Searching for 'drudge' returns drudge.com as the first result. If users are clicking on that link, and saying there, then that must be what they were looking for.

Searching for "drudge report" brings up drudgereport.com.

Also, after having searched for both "drudge" and "drudge report" several times in a row, drudgereport.com is the top result for both searches.

Look again! The first result is "Drudge Retort", a "wrecker" website designed to take clicks away from the actual real Drudge Report.

I can almost assure you it wasn't. I'm guessing the top result is

> drudge.com

Which is not the Drudge Report, but the Drudge "Retort". The Drudge Report, seems to be completely removed, obviously intentionally.

If I'm wrong, let me know. But I'd be very surprised if you're getting the Drudge Report at the top hit, and everybody else isn't getting it on the first multiple pages.

I am shocked. I followed the link and thought I'd hit the Drudge Report, saw this link and had to double check. I am shocked.

I do not see it on the first page of my results at all.

What I did notice was that if I go directly to the Drudge Report, it's "not secure." Seems to only be happening the first time I load the page. I wonder if that has something to do with it.

Wow, you're right. My mistake!

Here it is in my browser (which admittedly is a somewhat "hardened" privacy-wise version of FF).

https://imgur.com/a/KJL03NW

Wow. Showing up for me now too. I sent feedback to DDG. I also wonder if they saw this thread. Seems unlikely that it just happened to show back up a day after it got attention here.

Yep, search is getting more and more broken...

I remember all the "trump vs reporters" etc. compilations, that were funny... now searching for any of those terms (basically anything at all involving trump, or now russia) ignores almost everything in the searchbox, ignores all the small creators, just picks out the one keyword (trump/russia/putin/...), and show the CNN/MSNBC/... news related to that one term, and unrelated to other search terms in the search box.

We wan't search and "sort by relevant", not by "who we think is right".

It also tends to prioritize recency a lot. Good luck searching for something with terms that have been in the news lately.

Good luck searching for someone who shares the first name of someone who has been in the news lately.

That's if they don't disregard your query and just return results for whatever they deemed to be close enough. So if you search for Simone Something, it will just disregard what you wrote and just return tons of Simon Something even if there's no shortage of results for your actual query! It's incredible that even when searching for a specific real person/name Google still assumes it knows better and just throw out letters arbitrarily. It would only be reasonable to do so if there are 0 results for the exact name or maybe just a "did you mean?" prompt for suspected typos.

It never used to do that before and that's the most frustrating part imo

it's done that for a long time, and you've always been able to force a match by wrapping a word in quotes.

(I don't think it's a 100% "must have this keyword" in the boolean sense, but it is an extremely strong suggestion to the engine.)

Maybe we have finally reached the point where people don't know boolean operators anymore though

We have reached the point where google ignores them.

>you've always been able to force a match by wrapping a word in quotes

This no longer works very well. A while ago I was searching for the linux syscall which is identified in the manpages as 'splice(2)'

If I didn't include quote marks, I basically got pages of junk.

If I did include quote marks I basically got a page of junk and then a single relevant link halfway down the second page followed by another page and a half of junk.

I know to use 'verbatim' now but still very much a downgrade in terms of user experience.

I thought verbatim was supposed to be wrapped in " not , '

But to your point, strict "___" searches do not seem to be respected as much anymore.

FYI, assuming you're talking about YouTube, you can still see these funny compilation videos by being smart with the way you apply filters to the search. To be honest I am actually reluctant to tell you this online because I think if YouTube knew about this they would remove it, just like dislikes.

Yep, youtube... but google search is not much better... corporate news and pinterest on top, then everything else. Funnily enough, sometimes the pages that scrape github issues get even higher than original github issues themselves.

Bilibili's search also seems to be just about as aggressive for videos on politically sensitive topics in China.

But credibility is also obviously a quality issue for information based search. You give people relevancy without credibility and that's just what we have today with the state of SEO. We might say that Amazon has such an issue with the lack of curation.

Drudge Report sold out to the deep state, they didn't cover hardly any of the election integrity news at all (among other editorial decisions). The rumor is Matt Drudge doesn't even own it anymore. If you still get your "conservative" news from there I suggest switching to Rantingly.

Thanks for rantingly!

I don't see the relevance. The issue is that DDG is intentionally preventing people from finding a website that they're looking for. Worst, the top result is a look-alike website that would confuse a lot of people in to thinking it is the real thing.

I never get new from Drudge, but that doesn't mean I can't see the issue with my search engine trying to hide what I'm looking for from me.

It doesn’t exist anymore. That’s probably why it’s not being shown

Um.. what? lol. Google "drudge". It's the top result. Definitely exists.

Just because Matt Drudge stopped agreeing with Donald Trump doesn't mean he "sold out to the deep state". Drudge is just as conservative as he ever was. Many conservatives just pulled a hard shift in a different direction.

>I liked DDG because it respected the user.

Is there any evidence that they actually fulfilled their promises?

> I liked DDG because it respected the user.

Unless you were searching for anything recipe-related, in which case they will push results from their partner 'yummly'. Or if you were trying to get literal result from you search string, which it will apparently silently ignore if it doesn't find enough results.

Honestly, I'll dump DDG in a heartbeat whenever I find something even marginally better. Their only edge is the '!' syntax which I haven't yet bothered to find an independent solution for.

But why aren't bangs more ubiquitous? Did DDG patent them or something?

The actual logic behind it isn't anything stunning, it finds a bang, removes it from the query, then forwards the query to the search engine that was requested.

Kagi has been a dream. They support bangs as well.

I was only on the wait list for a couple of weeks before getting an invite; worth jumping in.

>Their only edge is the '!' syntax which I haven't yet bothered to find an independent solution for.

I simply mimic that bang behavior using my browser's ability to add custom searches. It's a slight pain to set up on a fresh install because of all the extra addresses I manually plug in but once done, I'm not necessarily tied to any search engine. If you're in Chromium you can right-click on the address bar and see the option to select "manage search engines." From there just start editing commands and changing things from ":yt" to "!yt" like we're used to. yt being a YouTube search.

Your usage might be vastly different than mine but I found myself using sipmle things like !yt (youtube) or !hn (hackernews search) for the most part. Hardly anything beyond that and a few specific Wikis.

For what it's worth, Brave's search engine also uses that ! bang feature though I'm not sure to what extent compared to DuckDuckGo.

Firefox can sync those keywords via bookmarks, but the feature's deprecated and not supported on mobile anymore, as expected.

Went with Brave, I like the effort of building their own index.

Suppose I go off and make a search engine, with my own algorithm for ranking search results. At first it works great. And then five years later, I find that, by a quirk in my algorithm, I find that a new site has risen to the top of all my results. This new site was created as a prank, and it contains authoritative-sounding but incorrect answers to common questions. The results returned are still relevant to my users, but they are now factually incorrect.

Should I simply accept that this site is the correct top result for my users' queries, since it has been ranked by my unbiased algorithm? Or should I decide to put my finger on the scale, and redesign my algorithm (possibly by simply reweighting results from this particular site) to change the rankings?

Does the answer change if the site is not a prank site, but is propoganda? Or an earnest-but-incorrect flat earther?

> contains authoritative-sounding but incorrect answers to common questions. The results returned are still relevant to my users, but they are now factually incorrect.

IMO the difference is between web-wide decisions vs something else. DDG have stated they're specifically targetting something beyond web pages.

If DDG has some way of measuring "misinformation" then fair play, we can assume it isn't specific to Russia because it'd be a universal solution.

Some sort of decree from the CEO about what is true and what is not just sounds dangerous. We might not fully understand automation, as in all search engines, but it's a safe wager that he doesn't understand it any better otherwise he would've coded it in already and it'd be a non-story for the searchers of the world.

So if I could only detect this one prank site, but did not have a way to detect and downrank all prank sites at once, you would say it's invalid for me to just take action against the one I know about, since that's not a universal solution?

define prank.

dictionary definition (according to Google)

>a practical joke or mischievous act.

Maybe if that's the definition then all Twitter parody accounts need to be removed. Would you agree?

Well that depends. If my position were that you have to act via "web-wide decisions" and "universal solutions", then I might conclude that my only options were to leave up all prank sites, including those damaging the usefulness of my search results, or remove everything including harmless parody accounts.

On the other hand, if I were to accept that it's valid to target individual sites or subsets of sites only as they become a problem, then I might conclude that removing this one troublesome prank site that is pointing my users to bad information does not require me to take action against random twitter parody accounts.

> I might conclude that my only options

I guess the point is that you were able to conclude that in the first place. You concluded there are options. An algorithm/decision removing one side of it means you do not, more so if you do not even get to understand why that choice was removed when you're making that choice.

>Should I simply accept that this site is the correct top result for my users' queries,

Yes, your users aren't using your search engine as an oracle for the truth, they're using it to find pages with similar text. It's their job (and specifically not yours) to determine how well the text they find corresponds with reality. Perhaps they're even aware the site is factually incorrect and enjoy reading it for the novelty, perhaps they want to cite it to warn others that sometimes things online are wrong. You have no idea what the people are doing with the information.

Google has started censoring their results because they decided people should use their search engine as a truth oracle (with the results you would expect, lets not forget the "when did George Washington go to the moon" thing from a year or so ago.) I think that's a mistake and is a large part of the reason I use DuckDuckGo.

You may have caught this one instance but there are likely an unlimited number of others. You're not going to catch everything and you make your search engine worse with every exception you make to the algorithm.

> Yes, your users aren't using your search engine as an oracle for the truth, they're using it to find pages with similar text.

I’m confident this is factually incorrect for a very very large subset of searches. Probably a majority.

It's never going to work for that though. This is like changing a hammer design because some people are hurting themselves using it as a comb.

It does work for that. For a large number of searches, on relatively uncontroversial topics, search engines have effectively become oracles of truth.

This is how google ended up with their modern design that discourages website clicks, they did research into their users and realized most people searching “Abraham Lincoln’s birthday” want to see the top result “February 12, 1809” and not the top result “https://www.loc.gov/item/today-in-history/february-12”

Obviously I’m aware that not all data is uncontroversial and agreed upon, but it’s a fact that a large percentage of searches are quite literally treating search engines as oracles of truth

>It does work for that.

It does not. I used the moon thing from last year as an example. Here[1] is a very noncontroversial query that still yields factually incorrect results in the box at the top. Yes if you read the results carefully and think about it you'll realize it's wrong but then you're doing the same thing you would be doing otherwise.

[1] https://www.google.com/search?sxsrf=APq-WBv0RNgr6Q3zUOjDc1lM...

And this example https://i.imgur.com/UkcR945.png that's still broken as it was half a year ago. ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27622613 )

> It does not.

In the "Abraham Lincoln’s birthday" example that the person gave, it absolutely does work that way in regards to the user's motivations.

When a user googles for "Abraham Lincoln’s birthday" They are almost certainly attempting to use a search engine as an oracle of truth.

> that still yields factually incorrect results

Search engines aren't perfect. That does not change the fact that the oracle of truth model, is a good model to describe a user's motivations.

Such as when they google "Abraham Lincoln’s birthday".

helen___keller wrote:

>This is how google ended up with their modern design that discourages website clicks, they did research into their users and realized most people searching “Abraham Lincoln’s birthday” want to see the top result “February 12, 1809” and not the top result “https://www.loc.gov/item/today-in-history/february-12”

But this is a false dichotomy. There are more options than either an infobox that says "February 12, 1809" and a "February 12 in history" page. I think you can agree that a link to the Wikipedia article on Abraham Lincoln will be a fine search result. At most the search engine needs to be smart enough to match "birthday" in the search query against variations of "born on" that are present in the article.

> But this is a false dichotomy. There are more options than either an infobox

I am not saying that there is only a singular way of displaying information.

Instead the point here is that Yes, users who search that are actually trying to use Google as an Oracle of Truth here, and if the top results are anything other than what his actual birthday is, then that is a problem.

So in other words, yes it is being used as an oracle of truth, even if there are different ways of precisely displaying that.

> I think you can agree that a link to the Wikipedia article on Abraham Lincoln will be a fine search result

Only if the article links is actually the truth, and not some other number. So yes the search engine is being used as an oracle of truth, to find out what the actual answer is to what his actual birthday is.

"The Covid vaccine doesn't prevent deaths 100% of the time. So it does not work."

Something doesn't need to be perfect to work well.

Could you source what you're basing your facts on? I know many people like myself are just looking to expand on the text we're searching for, and letting the free market decide what's a good search result.

The best supporting data is the rise in no-click searches. See https://sparktoro.com/blog/in-2020-two-thirds-of-google-sear...

No-click searches continue to grow in share while google continues to adopt design that presents information outside a traditional link, like a weather widget or the fact you were looking for presented at the top in large text outside the scope of a link.

This suggests a growing share of searches weren’t looking for links in the first place, they were looking for information and when the search engine provided that information, the user left without clicking a link

I’m rarely an expert on the broad keywords I search for. That’s why I’m searching: to learn.

I would use a search engine that makes some attempt to rank higher quality, more accurate information higher than others.

>they're using it to find pages with similar text.

This is one vision of what a search engine's job is, but I'm not sure it's what most users are looking for. Even barebones pagerank goes far beyond just finding similar text - it uses structure of the web's link graph to estimate the quality of a page. Now obviously pagerank is not directly trying to ascertain which pages are truthful and which are not, but it is arguably using connectedness as a proxy - the assumption is that people tend to link to reliable, useful pages and tend not to link to incorrect, harmful ones.

Does vanilla pagerank also violate your boundaries for what a search engine should do?

> Yes, your users aren't using your search engine as an oracle for the truth, they're using it to find pages with similar text.

The reason google removes factually incorrect results is because this is actually exactly what the vast majority of people use search engines for.

Your view is completely opposed to all of the recent "Google search is totally broken due to garbage SEO sites" HN articles.

I'd say a good search engine should try to deliver the results the user is looking for. Simple as that. It probably can never be perfect, as the search engine can only guess what the user is looking for. But it can try to do its best.

There is no rule that it should rank sites by page rank or number of keywords or whatever.

If I don't want to see "Russian Disinformation", I probably won't search for it to begin with. On the other hand, maybe I want to see what all the fuss is about - then why should the search engine stand in my way?

I think you're framing the discussion in the wrong way.

Yes, if you're looking for "Russian Disinformation", you should be able to find it.

But if I'm looking for "U.S. midterm elections", I shouldn't get Russian disinformation.

What is the problem with modifying the algorithm to favor actual information over disinformation? Or sites that are known to propagate disinformation?

The only thing I could say is that it's weirdly specific to Russian disinformation. Disinformation should be disfavored no matter the country of origin.

I shouldn’t get American disinformation, but your trusted sources are untouchable.

All general critiques about DDG aside, it is absolutely untrue that search engines never target American news sources for downranking. Google/DDG and other sites have removed and downranked American news sites on multiple occasions. Scroll through this very comment section and you'll find someone complaining about DDG's handling of Drudgereport[0].

It was not that long ago that we were having really fierce debates about when and how aggregators and algorithms should filter/downrank vaccine misinformation, and a ton of that debate revolved around downranking American news sources and commentators.

----

[0]: I do want to note that it isn't immediately clear to me that DDG did downrank Drudgereport, and sometimes people just get kind of conspiratorial about things, but I'm taking commenter at their word since I assume they have some source for that they just didn't mention.

They won’t down-rank American disinformation from sources they trust or sources they favor.

This can all be solved by adding an option for results without down-ranking political disinformation.

> They won’t down-rank American disinformation from sources they trust or sources they favor.

Nobody suppresses a source that they trust. Of course search engines don't downrank sources that they think are trustworthy. Why would they? There's also nothing specific to America about that, DDG also doesn't suppress foreign news sources that it personally trusts as accurate, because... they're sources they trust.

That sentence is a frankly kind of impressive effort to rephrase a critique that is essentially, "I disagree with their decisions, and I think the sources they trust aren't actually trustworthy" as some kind of much broader general criticism, like search engines are bad for not making editorial/ranking decisions that are the opposite of what they think are the correct editorial/ranking decisions to make.

> Why would they?

They should down-rank their trusted sources when their trusted sources publish disinformation. The problem is they don’t.

> They should down-rank their trusted sources when their trusted sources publish disinformation.

If search engines thought that their trusted sources were publishing disinformation, they wouldn't be trusted sources.

You just disagree with their decisions about what is trustworthy, that's all. There's nothing deeper going on, it's not surprising that a search engine trusts a source that it trusts.

> If search engines thought that their trusted sources were publishing disinformation, they wouldn't be trusted sources.

You’re confusing propaganda sources with fallible trusted sources.

No, I'm commenting on the fact that search engines do block propaganda sources in the US when they think they're a significant source of harmful propaganda, but very obviously they don't block propaganda sources that they don't think are propaganda.

Your problem is that these engines disagree with you about what is and isn't a harmful propaganda source. That's a reasonable disagreement to have. But you're trying to phrase this like it's some kind of deliberate action or general policy on their part, and it just doesn't make any sense. They do block American sites when they think those sites are significant sources of misinformation. And for extremely obvious reasons that should not be confusing or surprising to anyone, they don't block sites for violating policies that they don't think the sites have violated, because that would be an absurd system for moderating content.

It's like asking, "why won't the police officers arrest all of the guilty people that they think are innocent?" Because they think they're innocent.

> they don't block propaganda sources that they don't think are propaganda

That’s the point of contention.

> But you're trying to phrase this like it's some kind of deliberate action or general policy on their part, and it just doesn't make any sense.

It doesn’t make sense because I’m saying that.

Users upset with DDG understand that everyone is blinded by bias, so don’t attempt to filter topics that can be affected by it.

The solution is give those users options for unfiltered results like they do with safe search.

> The solution is give those users options for unfiltered results

Important to remember at this point in the conversation, DuckDuckGo didn't say that they were going to filter these results (although I also wouldn't really have a problem with that), they announced that they were going to downrank some of the sites.

Safe search toggles turn off actual content removal, which kind of makes sense -- there's a list of "mature" sites that are included in the list of possible search results or excluded. But ranking is different, turning off a site ranking doesn't make any sense in the context of a search engine. You want a toggle to make results no longer be a list?

Everything on DDG is ranked, everything is. There aren't separate categories of ranked and unranked content, there's no set of websites where DuckDuckGo isn't ranking them alongside other websites. It doesn't make any sense to say that DuckDuckGo shouldn't rank political content or news sites when returning them in searches, I don't know from a UI perspective what that would even look like.

I guess completely randomly sorting the search results for those queries? But... I mean, no one would want that feature, you would never be able to find relevant information for a political query.

Even before DuckDuckGo made this announcement and even before the war in Ukraine started, DuckDuckGo was always ranking these sites. There was never a period of time where these sites weren't being ranked higher or lower on search pages than other sites, and that ranking was always being determined in part by DuckDuckGo's internal bias about how rankings should work and what was and wasn't a "relevant" or accurate news source. From day one, from the start of the search engine, they were always ranking political content.

The problem is not "U.S. midterm elections" but "Ukraine invasion 2022".

Part of the problem is that defining "relevance" is hard, and quickly descends into gray areas and morality. Russian disinformation about Ukraine is relevant in that it actually is content about the Ukraine invasion in 2022. But it's not relevant in that it's not facts about the Ukraine invasion in 2022.

Maybe there should be a button that lets users opt-out of "factual only" results to see the full uncensored internet, much like how there is a button that lets users opt-out of porn filters.

For that matter, we should have more filters, but users should be able to see what they are and opt out of them manually. Porn, violence, suspected "disinformation" and conspiracy theories, etc. I would love to have all of these turned off by default, but be able to re-enable them selectively.

Of course, that means you still have the problem where one organization (or a handful of organizations) gets to dictate what is considered "disinformation", but that's arguably a separate problem from not letting users control their experience.

Ultimately isn’t “disinformation” control exactly the problem? There are abundant examples of disinformation just being information that was 24-96 hours ahead of the news cycle (sometimes 6-9 months).

DDG has now decided that they are editors because their perspective is “correct”, but on what authority?

Why would they show Russian information about the war when you search for Midterm elections?

The issue is that they are introducing a manual intervention in the algorithm out of political motives.

They are not automatically a great authority on correctness of information regarding the war. I don't think DDG has investigators on the ground in Ukraine.

Of course ultimately all search engines will apply some criteria for correctness or relevance of information. Maybe we should applaud DDG for at least being transparent about it.

So in the end presumably you have to pick the search engine just like you pick your other news sources.

It is just a pity that DDG previously advertised itself as "unbiased", and now they throw that goal out of the window.

Still it feels like the search engine feeding me results that they want me to find, not the ones that I most likely would want to find.

"If I don't want to see "Russian Disinformation", I probably won't search for it to begin with."

? Nobody is really searching for 'disinformation'.

That's the whole point.

Is 'disinformation' really 'what they were looking for'?

Or were they looking for good information, and the 'misinformation' - which doesn't appear as 'misinformation' comes up first. They click it and become unwittingly 'misinformed'.

It's obviously very nuanced, but there is definitely such a thing as misinformation and especially propaganda.

For example, I see a ton of feeds sharing RUS losses with video snippets etc. but not a lot of UKR losses. Unless it's civilians in which case they want the information out there i.e. 'war crimes'.

Or more nuanced: the words of Putin himself. He 'misinforms' arguably by misrepresenting literally every thing he talks about, and obfuscating other realities. There are 100% pro-Nazi sympathisers in UKR forces. But it's also pretty clear that the government is not a 'Nazi Regime' by any stretch.

Issues such as 'NATO Threat' which is in some ways real, but used as an excuse really, because there is no material threat of the invasion of Russia.

So it's complicated.

There's also the fact that little bits of misinformation can contribute a lot to public opinion. I can just be 'populist' stuff. Like a funny picture oof Biden next to a 'strong and commanding Putin'. Charicatures influence people. That's a bit of a different domain, but also relevant.

When wars break out, we have to be a bit more pragmatic and also vigilant.

In the war situation, I assume everything is potentially misinformation, and want to see statements from all sides.

I mean if you read Western media, they will literally write "Russia is putting out a lot of disinformation", so that would be at least one claim I could try to verify myself, by looking at actual Russian media.

But the more important point is, how does DDG decide what is misinformation and what is not? Sure a search engine always has to try to rank information by some criteria. The issue I have here is with a manual interference in the algorithm that seems politically motivated.

Realistically, I guess we should be thankful that at least DDG points out that they are doing that, whereas others are simply doing it without telling anybody (on all sorts of issues, not just this war).

Also, I think some "internet savvyness" has to be expected from search engine users. The assumption that just because some statements by Putin show up in search results, people would just flat out believe them, is rather insulting and belittling.

1) There is a difference between 'rah rah nationalism' and 'disinformation'. The Western media is not putting out disinformation so much as focusing on the things that benefit them. This is perennial.

2) It's myth that there is some kind of 'neutrality' in term of search - you have to pick an algorithm. It's rational to want to chose sources that have integrity as opposed to those that do not. 'Information Populism' i.e. just picking the 'most popular link' leads to the 'National Equiror' type information.

3) "how does DDG decide what is misinformation and what is not" and "politically motivated"

This moral relativism is the problem with the 'free speech' advocates. There is something as the 'truth' and, some parties are better at communicating it. Some parties actually just make up whatever they want and say it. There are ways to make that determination. Everyone is based, some more than others.

4) " I think some "internet savvyness" has to be expected from search engine users. "

"The assumption that just because some statements by Putin show up in search results, people would just flat out believe them, is rather insulting and belittling."

Both of these statements are essentially wrong.

Almost nobody has the 'internet savviness, time and wherewithal' to actually fact check. Less than 0.1% of people. Most people are not paying close attention to any issues, let alone a specific one, and don't have the wherewithal to do anything about Tweets they say. Moreover, 'most people' are populist, they like to twee jokes, get angry, like things that make fun of the group they don't like.

As for b) 30% of Americans believe that the 'election was stolen' by Joe Biden, when there isn't a shred of evidence to support that lie. And that's a pretty big lie. So imagine that - at least 30% of people will believe you if they just want to believe you. 30% of people believe that Police are evil and just want to arbitrarily arrest and beat black people, and that merely the act of getting pulled over is dangerous, which is also ridiculous. Racism exists, but anti-racism hysteria has given people a context that simply is not true. The evidence actually supports that.

This is why 'Putins words alone' can be dangerous. His current 'propagnda' about 'Denazification' and that the UKR government is a bunch of 'Nazis and Drug Addicts' is perverse, and that the government is fully of Nazis.

But 75% of Russians believe it fully.

How do you think he managed to convince 75% of the Russian population of things that are ridiculously untrue?

Russians are getting calls from relatives in Ukraine, and literally not believing them when they hear of bombings in Kiev, they'd rather believe the propaganda that 1st hand evidence.

That's the power of misinformation and it speaks to the fact that people aren't often even interested in the truth at all, but rather that which makes them feel better.

Finally - if you want access to Putins' words, it's all there. There's nothing hidden. If that's what you are really searching for you will get it. You can easily find on DDG and Google his 'Mein Kampf' style works where he's justifying the grand narratives of the invasion. In that context, anyone searching specifically for that is going to find it in the 'quality' context we'd expect from DDG or Google.

Nothing is being hidden or censored, it's all there if you actively search for it.

What we don't want is Putins' propaganda seeping through the cracks into every day populist rhetoric. We don't want his army of social influences able to make their lies and propaganda party of the daily vocabulary of common information ingestion.

"The Western media is not putting out disinformation so much as focusing on the things that benefit them."

What do you mean - Western media doesn't lie, only shifts focus? Sorry that is just flat out wrong. The last couple of years should have tought you that.

"This moral relativism is the problem with the 'free speech' advocates. There is something as the 'truth' and, some parties are better at communicating it."

Um no sorry, your type of thinking is exactly the problem. There is no neutral way to establish truth, so nobody should be given the authority to say what is true or not.

"Both of these statements are essentially wrong."

People believe stupid shit - the solution is not to establish some "authority" forcing people to believe just some stupid shit.

The Trump fans may seem stupid for believing Biden stole the election, but his opponents were equally stupid for believing in the Russian collusion theory. Yet that was relentlessly pushed by mainstream media.

"This is why 'Putins words alone' can be dangerous."

Yeah because Russians have no other news sources. That is exactly why it is bad to limit access to news sources, as DDG is doing indirectly.

"it speaks to the fact that people aren't often even interested in the truth at all, but rather that which makes them feel better."

So DDG is just trying to make us feel better?

"Nothing is being hidden or censored, it's all there if you actively search for it."

That is such a hypocritical claim. Given all your arguments, you seem to be fully aware that that is not how information flow works.

The problem is that the definition of disinformation isn't really about accuracy - it's mostly "what is (woke) California prepared to accept". For example, most of the coronavirus "disinfo" bans have been handed out on a basis of roughly like "is this useful for the goal of making people adhere to covid policy?" If you say vaccines won't prevent transmission before Cali is okay with it, byebye, even though the statement has always been accurate. It just hasn't been part of blue California's story until lately. Talking about lab leak? It's okay now, but has gotten people banned for the last couple years.

So what will "Russian disinfo" be like? It's hard to even know what the facts are since truth is the first casualty of war.

What would you direct searches for "strawman" to?

I think the role of a search engine is to index the page, and to help users find what they're looking for. It's a difficult task that requires somehow quantifying relevance of answers for a given text string.

Whatever quantification is used is an implicit kind of 'censorship', and the 'relevance' of results for a given string is inherently a value-judgement. That's where the value of a search engine comes from. We choose search engines based off how good its value judgements are.

So, I wish DDG released more details here, because this announcement otherwise just sounds like standard practice. Abusing "quirks in the algorithm" is just called SEO, and it's been a cat-and-mouse battle between search-engines and abuse. Without details, it's harder to interpret this move generously.

That sounds about right. A search engine has to try and intuit what users are going to want. Decisions have to be made to show one thing above another. In order for us to trust the engine though, we should have a way of knowing what values are referred to when making these decisions.

Judging by the replies to this thread, I don't think anyone here knows what an algorithm is. How do you think any search engine on the planet "objectively" decides how to show you the top 10 results for a search term out of billions of possibilities? There are a thousand knobs constantly being turned behind the scenes depending on the preferences of the operator. "Non-biased search results" are impossible by definition.

And making some stance about what results you should see based on a war that is going on is wrong. If someone searches for a keyword they should get back results that are relevant to the keyword. They should not have results filtered on this impression that those results come from paticular sources that are deemed by DDG as russian propaganda. Search engines are not supposed to filter out propaganda. That propaganda article could be the most relevant article even if every word in the article is a lie. Also what if you are specifically looking for disinformation? Now you can’t use the search engine properly. If they are such transparent kings give us the option ourselves to press the button to filter russia out but they wont because they know we will do a diff and expose the political bias

They are censoring russia and it is wrong in the global scheme of what the internet is supposed to give us access too. We are going backwards with this bullshit. Educate people dont hide stuff from them, its annoying

We expect them to filter spam and scams.

If RT / Sputnik use SEO to target the keyword “Ukraine conflict”, it creates a worse experience for users. Right now RT is not on the top page for that search term. I’m guessing that’s what they’re targeting.

If you search “rt Ukraine conflict”, the #1 result is RT. You can still easily find content you’re looking for.

It just won’t be part of those wide net searches I’m guessing.

They did not state anything about seo spam. You are just assuming. They stated they are down ranking domains associated with Russian disinformation, meaning they are censoring Russia. If it was SEO spam then the fix for that would benefit all of search. I highly doubt they care about that, they are introducing censorship by domain on the basis the content served by the domain is not correct. Very tricky to actually verify and sleazy

> If it was SEO spam then the fix for that would benefit all of search.

SEO spammers co-opt legit techniques, so there’s no 1 size fits all solution. Google has to ban and penalize sites all the time.

And what if the user is not specifically looking for propaganda? If I search for "Ukraine war", the top result can be CNN or Ukraine News or RT. The engine operator has to decide which one of these to show me. What is the objectively correct option according to you?

Unbiased search is impossible, so DDG should be deliberately biased?

The long term solution is to get away from "top 10 results". All this has done is provide a stream of effectively the exact same thing being said just across different platforms. It doesn't provide people with perspective, it just becomes a system for gamification. I want perspective, deduplication, and some way of seeing everything hierarchically.

i know what an algorithm is and it doesn't involve some human making a decision to remove russian content from the internet.

I want to use a search engine that puts all its effort into down-ranking sites that I'm not searching for

I want one which doesn't decide this for me, no-matter how "good for me" it may be, and relies exclusively on my search query to decide what is most relevant.

If you really want to flag disinformation, I'd be fine with some sort percentage reliability value or something along those lines, right next to the result. Preferably something that I can also order results by. Totally happy with a 'caveat emptor' clause regarding who comes up with those reliability values.

But down-ranking sites by default is not how this is supposed to work. "It's for a 'good cause'" is not the point. It's always going to be for a "good cause (TM)".

Besides, what's so bad about access to "disinformation"? I prefer being presented with bad arguments whose value I get to judge for myself, than being told I'm not getting all the arguments, only those whose value someone else decided on my behalf.

Exactly. If I'm searching for Russian propaganda, I should see Russian propaganda in my search results. If I'm searching for good bicycle reviews, I should see good bicycle reviews.

What should be shown if you search for „why did russia invade ukraine“?

Whatever your Native State wants you to believe, of course.

a mix of both with a slider to parametrize the sentiment of the results "it's pure evil VS itls good"

or I dunno... it's a near-waste of time to imagine what this could/should be as I'm in no poisition to build it.

analysts and historians saying "it's complicated"

But its not complicated at all. Ukraine is every year more prosperous and more connected to the west and Russia is weakening kleptocracy led by a disconnected, malicious, evil dictator that fears that if it doesn't seize the opportunity to return to its vision of a greater Russia that has a seat at the table in the grand scheme of things that it will ultimately be subsumed by either the west or by its own people who see clear evidence of a better way so close at hand.

In service of this goal it has turned first to brutal invasion of another nations sovereign territory and when this proved ineffectual to brutal mass murder of the Ukrainian people, war crimes, mercenaries, and assassins in hopes of breaking a nations people and its leaders.

The complicated thing is a full analysis of why its war machine and intelligence is so broken as to lead them to believe this would lead to course of action would be profitable.

Let us not try to discount the complexity of the Russian motivation for war (and no matter what they are, it's still morally wrong).

Firstly, Ukraine was most prosperous in 2013. Even in recent years, Ukrainian wealth was growing more slowly than that of, say, Belarus. Even with sanctions, up until the pandemic, Russian GDP per capita PPP was increasing at a similar rate as with Ukraine. So it is unlikely that this was the only motivation, Ukraine was never on track to becoming more prosperous than Russia or it's satellites, nor even becoming relatively more prosperous in recent years. Indeed, Ukraine's economic system is pretty similar to that of Russia, and both countries have had similar levels of corruption by various indexes.

Then, there are obviously many other possible motivations, neither of them were a justification alone, and many analysts squabble still about what they were. So yes, "it's complicated".

You're literally just spouting the West's approved propaganda and don't even realize it.

Actually I have followed a plethora of information from individuals on the ground and historical information from multiple sources. What I have posted is as close to objective reality as I can obtain and I am very confident it its veracity.

The fact that you have information from "individuals on the ground" and from "multiple sources" doesn't make the information correct or unbiased. What you posted may as well have come directly from Ukrainian state media.

"Putin was jealous that Ukraine was doing so much better than Russia, so he attacked them for no reason to bring them back down" is just a laughable take on the situation.

It's also not what I said. I said Putin had a vision of a "Greater Russia" composed of the components of its former empire and reached out to grasp them before its declining strength made this impossible. This is literally what Putin said in prior speeches.

I also said that democracies on their doorstep are a dangerous precedent for the serfs the kleptocrats are presently robbing.

Ok, enlighten me. What is the real reason?

The data of the past decade doesn’t show this to be the case. Check Ukraine with Belarus and Russia economic numbers. It negates your or really the west’s framing.

“ Ukraine is every year more prosperous”

jesus christ. stopped reading here

I don't regard carriage of misinformation used to justify genocide as morally neutral nor do I hope many others. If you feel existing search engines are insufficiently neutral towards evil you are free to start your own.

Search engines results represent and will continue to ultimately represent a human value judgement because there is no mathematical answer to what is the right answer for what is the right set of results for this query because both engineers at the search engine and the pages indexed are adjusting their software based not on mathematical correctness but instead on the first parties desire to return humanly useful results not mathematically useful results and the latter's desire to be visible regardless of utility to the end user.

If we correctly abandon neutrality as the lie it is then it is merely a question of whether lies that justify genocide have greater utility than actual facts. This is I think an easier question to answer.

What is a query you would use to search exclusively for Russian propaganda?

search rt.com

Now blocked in several countries.

Really?

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=rt&ia=web

Works fine for me in the US. RT.com is the first result.

What countries are you referring to? And is this DDG’s decision or are they being forced to comply with the country’s law?

I was mainly referring to the EUs ban on RT. I think the law forces the ISPs to comply, not the engines. that way it prevents direct access via the URL.

https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2022/03/08/eu-officials-d...

RT is not banned in the US as far as I know, although it appears engines are banning some content of their own free will.

This is TV broadcast ban. Thankfully EU currently doesn't have methods to block websites.

> Besides, what's so bad about access to "disinformation"?

This is an excellent point that doesn’t get as much discussion as it deserves. Censorship of misinformation seems to be rooted in the idea that the masses cannot/should not have the freedom to think and discuss information freely.

Also, there is a great deal of valuable insight which can be gained by analyzing a country’s propaganda.

There is great value in analyzing propaganda if you know it's propaganda. The danger comes in the fact that the majority of people can't distinguish actual reporting from disinformation. That's why it gets down-ranked.

You are correct. However, the solution should be better education, not censorship.

If DDG can overhaul the worldwide education system, I'm sure we'd all be in favor of that.

But since the best solution is impossible, at least right now, a half measure like this seems reasonable to offer some amount of protection.

Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. We should do what we can now, and keep pushing for better solutions. Holding out for perfection does nothing to help people now, or possibly ever, depending on your definition of "perfect".

Educate who and how? What concrete steps should be taken right now instead of downranking manipulative information warfare?

the problem is the stuff getting downranked is going to be the real information. the powerful people who control everything, including the news, are going to push propaganda and censor in whatever way makes themselves richer at the expense of everybody else, which is how they got to be in that position in the first place

Are you claiming that the search results currently being downranked, i.e. Russian propaganda, is the "real information?" If so, who is that making richer?

Propaganda can be useful to analyze, yes. But only if you know that it's propaganda. Most people casually searching DDG are probably not aware of that. If you know enough to know that some news source is spreading propaganda and you want to study it, then you know enough to be able to access it directly. Propaganda wants to be found, and you can always just go to RT yourself.

Propaganda should be treated as a hazardous material. Yes, it can be studied, and there is value in studying it, but there are safety protocols that should be followed to protect yourself and others. Uranium is very useful and scientifically valuable, but it shouldn't be on the shelves at your local Walmart where people can stumble upon it, unaware of the dangers.

Propaganda is an infohazard and should be treated as such; an information retrieval service should not surface it readily for a casual search.

> Besides, what's so bad about access to "disinformation"?

Disinformation doesn't just try to present an alternative view, it also tries to drown out other viewpoints. I don't think it's possible to accurately and neutrally present search results when bad actors try to subvert rankings.

I think propaganda can be interesting, I don't think it should be banned. But penalizing it seems fair to me. I don't want other searches to get flooded with clickbait.

"Disinformation doesn't just try to present an alternative view, it also tries to drown out other viewpoints."

So, basically what is done now by downranking "disinformation", right?

If I want to know if a Foobar Baz Sedan is a good car then legit reviews and spam generated by paid shills aren't equally useful and since there is a finite time available to produce quality content having 1000x more spam will make it absolutely impossible for the real information to be obtained by anyone.

Searching google for war in ukraine returns over 2 billion results. It is impossible not to privilege some information over others. Believing that any software designed by people can possibly be unbiased is absolute misunderstanding.

We are not talking about believing if something is unbiased, or if something can be unbiased, we are talking about said something being actively biased in the name of "the greater good"

> Searching google for war in ukraine returns over 2 billion results.

Google always lies about the number of results. You'll see the real number once you dig in. First screenshot shows what you get by default, second shows what you get after you enable "omitted results."

https://imgur.com/a/pgiTYuV

No one disagrees with this in principle. The huge problem is that no one is capable of building a reliable propaganda detector, for many reasons. Furthermore, a good amount of propaganda comes from the "good" guys.

Doesn't seem incompatible. I assume most people searching for general news about Ukraine are not seeking for Russian state media's take on it.

It's not, for him and anyone else you "assume." For others, yes.

I've watched US propaganda from WW2, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, etc. I don't trust the US government or their news agencies anymore than any other propaganda. They'll pick the facts that support their side and mix in lies without a second thought.

There are three truths in war: My side, their side, and the truth.

If they feel compelled to do something, poison the well by marking sites as suspected Russian propaganda. Otherwise, let me read what I want and make up my own mind.

If I wanted my search engine to play politics, I'd just use Google.

Any links to this? I would love to watch some old videos from that time.

Not videos, but these two articles played a formative role in my worldview (related to Iraq):

WaPo: "Irrefutable" : https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/2003/02/06/i...

NYTimes: "Irrefutable and Undeniable" : https://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/06/opinion/irrefutable-and-u...

I find it extremely interesting to occasionally reread those knowing what we know now. And nothing has changed, except for now there is significant push to try to censor anything beyond such irrefutable sources.

Interesting, seems like the Russian „Firehose of Falsehoods“ model seemed to work pretty well on a sizeable demographic of even HN to make them distrust anything:

https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE198.html

I‘m not saying I‘m blindly following either sides‘ narrative, but to me there is a clear trustworthyness hierarchy between the narrative of a society where I can still freely read, discuss and criticize these obvious pieces of misinformation (while they stay on the record!) and a society that changes its own narrative every other day and where just mentioning the word „war“ can lock me up in jail for 15 years by now.

>to me there is a clear trustworthyness hierarchy between the narrative of a society where I can still freely read, discuss and criticize these obvious pieces of misinformation

This no longer describes US society. We are better than Russia, but fall short of this description. Google actively delists information, including publications and statements from the US government and private citizens.

This extends beyond "misinformation" to categorical topics which citizens are not allowed to learn about

A society that changes its narrative every otver day sounds like America. And it is becoming less free by the day, though less by government coercion and more due to private actors falling in line behind ideology and the idea that neutrality is not just overrated, but wrong and immoral.

That the punishment is not prison but people going after your job (and often succeeding at it, and people thinking such thibgs are ok) doesn't mean the society is free.

Contrast a society where the government executes you for being gay, where it throws you in prison and a society where everyone looks at you funny and your family disowns you. The degree of coercion differs in all, but are gay people fully free in any?

It's worth noting that both of those examples were from the opinion section. Those aren't intended or required to be objective truth. And even then, they're just commenting on what Congress's position was at the time.

>It's worth noting that both of those examples were from the opinion section.

I mean that's a common refute. It wasn't news, it says opinion. Would you defend Fox News with that same argument? Also, opinion is just as curated as the news. You don't seen any editorials by David Duke on the NYT.

I finally got around to reading it.

What an absolute shock. Even though I have the benefit of hindsight and know how the story ends, it is still incredible to read the article and feel the confidence emanating from the journalist. The whole thing has an air of well-researched credibility - the professionalism you would expect from an authoritative source.

Yet it is dead wrong about the facts.

It really makes you wonder what else we hear that is blatantly false but do not question it.

It's harder to find news from that time (that time being pre-internet) that isn't based in approved propaganda than news that is.

The best thing to read about it would be Walter Lippmann in general, but starting with Public Opinion.

> Doesn't seem incompatible.

Of course they are incompatible to some extent. Otherwise, explicit downranking of Russian sources would be pointless.

Chance is that that many do, specifically if they are from Russia, India, China, Middle east.. so about half the world population?

Or anyone who considers them agnostic really, wanting to hear information from all sides before constructing a mental model of the situation.

If you're interested in the war, but not interested in communications from the countries involved in that war, that's willful ignorance. The essence of the censorship of Russian, Chinese, and Iranian media is to keep people from media that they would be interested in, not to help people avoid media they're not interested in; people do a good job of that themselves.

People who only want to read their government's approved information should download uBlock Homeland while the rest of us read what we want.

And if you search for communications from the countries involved you will still find them in DDG! They're just no longer on the first page of a "Ukraine news" query

I bet if they made uBlock Homeland branded as "ruBlock" people would turn using it into a status symbol.

They should though. There's no other way to understand this war.

Like, to an outsider it's mistifying why Putin is doing this, but even more mystifying why Russia is letting him - reading the news from their POV helps you understand that.

Without understanding that, you can't really understand how the war is going, or what the end game is.

Western news mostly just wants to tell you about atrocities, and how wonderfully Ukraine is doing against Russia.

https://twitter.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1498491107902062592

You could listen to Western sources and understand the Russian perspective much better than the breathless confusion in a lot of media.

Brilliantly stated. This is literally their one job.

You know, I am beginning to see that all that talk about mass psychosis caused by social isolation due to Covid and lockdowns was onto something. It explains a lot of what is happening right now. People are hyper-focused on only one thing and pay zero attention to long-term and larger-context consequences of their actions. And proud of it.

I have no idea what all of the talk about mass psychosis is even trying to say and the video about it that went viral feels a bit...manufactured?

I’m sure there’s a term for it, but it’s saying something that could be true without providing data or any accountability kind of like a horoscope.

“People seem much more X than they did Y years ago.”

The power of suggestion makes you start noticing all the examples of X in the last Y years.

That's the exact feeling I got from it. It says nothing and can be broadly applied to anything with philosopher quotes sprinkled in.

The comments also seemed less than genuine and the source of the material is anonymous.

Not only that, but I’m observing lately that Western culture is becoming increasingly juvenile and generally lacking in wisdom, apparently by deliberately forgetting the past.

In the past you'd get your information via your city newspaper, maybe the NYT/WSJ or another national newspaper if you strived to be "well informed" and then your choice of the NBC/ABC/CBS nightly news because cable didn't exist yet. The filters in front of the bulk of the population were much stronger then.

Because social media gave literal juveniles power in numbers whereas in real life their opinions would have been largely ignored. On social media, you don't know if you're talking to a high-schooler, a bot, or a state sponsored troll. Yet their opinion is essentially weighted the same as a PhD scholar.

Like Signal, I approve of DuckDuckGo generally, and sometimes they make bad moves.

This is one of them.

Censoring the baddies may seem obvious, but once you open this can of worms, there's no closing it.

Seriously what the f*ck makes Gabriel Weinberg think that myself, or anyone else, gives a damn about his personal opinion on what I should and should not be reading. The arrogance of these people is astounding.

Also, absolutely zero of the standard base of Duck Duck Go users are the kind of people who don't understand what a Russian state controlled news site is, and why one would have to be careful reading it. Those people may well exist, but they would be using Google. This move makes their disdain for their users obvious.

There is now no reason to be using Duck Duck Go over startpage.com, which also doesn't track you, but gives you the results straight from google, which are always much better than duck duck go.

Edit: Retracting my advocating for using Bing directly. As ColinHayhurst pointed out elsewhere in the comments, Bing is also excluding results, specifically RT and Sputnik (see the "Protection from state-sponsored disinformation" section):

https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2022/02/28/ukraine...

This is a weird stance to take about a search engine which is "tell me what to read as a service." Like you're literally using them to surface the wheat from the chaff. The algorithm that ranks results is already biased as hell and sometimes it's going to get it wrong. Google surfacing lots of stackoverflow spam sites isn't "unbiased" it's junk and manual correction is totally fine.

This word keeps coming in this comments section: "spam." Spam was never mentioned in the Tweet, the source of this discussion. In fact no one in the comments section is talking about spam either, unless its a pathetic debunking attempt. They are talking about genuine results being down-ranked based on their ideological, even morally unscrupulous content, and why that is harmful to intelligent people who don't need their information retrieval service helping them form thoughts.

I just used spam sites as an example of "site that's highly ranked by the algorithm but are uncontroversially recognized as an error."

Define a "genuine result" for a search engine that isn't the result of a process that arbitrarily ranks sites by certain metrics? Like it's humans all the way down, you can't escape that search engines are a large scale system representing "what a group of humans thinks the best results are." There's no unbiased algorithms in search, it's all curation.

As I said - nobody here is confused what spam entails. I'll remind you again the Tweet did not say it it targeting spam - and your conflation of spam with misinformation is a useful bit of ignorance for those who want control narratives. Slippery slope, friend.

Is propaganda a "genuine result"? Yeah yeah, one person's truth is another person's propaganda and sometimes the lines are blurry. But cases like RT are pretty clear cut. Sometimes people actually do lie, and those lies are verifiable. Verifiable lies, and the sources who create them predictably and consistently, should not be considered a "genuine result" for a query regarding things that are happening right now.

Pretending that both sides are equal is not always helpful. Bad actors do exist, and pretending that everything is equally indeterminate is a fatally nihilistic and dangerous view. Sometimes we actually can tell when something is a lie, and we should treat it appropriately. For a tool that retrieves genuine results matching a query, that means down-ranking them.

For the purposes of current event queries, disinformation is certainly spam. The purpose of spam is to fool you into doing something you probably wouldn't otherwise do, usually based on false pretenses. Disinformation is the same. The action it promotes is more indirect - it seeks to influence beliefs, and therefore voting patterns and soft power - but it is still spread with a purpose that is disingenuous. It disguises it's true intent and is dangerous to the user. It is effectively spam applied to the domain of politics and current events, and should be treated as spam is. It should not be a valid result in an information retrieval service.

I agree that this ranking could be the start of a slippery slope. But DDG is being transparent, and you can still get to RT if you disagree. This is a good measure for people unfamiliar with Russia news sources and propaganda networks, who are the people most likely to be susceptible to Russian propaganda.

Cases like RT are clear cut to you. Others have other opinions. I think that the Russian claims that Ukraine is harboring neo-nazis are significantly bunk and are poor excuse for the invasion, but I also think you can't deny that the Azov Brigade exists, and I want to hear the Russian take on that even if I think it's half lies.

Then you can still go over to rt.com and check that out for yourself. With your knowledge that it is half lies, you can be actively engaged and discerning. But those lies should not be easily accessible for the uninitiated who are just casually curious about current events.

Intelligent people are better off not patronized - and fighting disinformation through censorship rather than rebuttal is a pathetic reflection on the state of society. This type of censorship makes it harder for intelligent people to make clear rebuttals and reinforces a culture of tarring people taking the first step of looking into the other side for this purpose.

This is always the line but it ignores that it's more vastly more effort to correct disinformation and propaganda than it is to spew it. Don't patronize intelligent people by making them have to spend literally their entire day having to fight this garbage rather than doing useful work.

Or you could do the obvious: give people capable of contextualizing search results unnerfed tools.

I think there is a conflation of literal fake news and propaganda. Propaganda can be subtle and not involve outright lies. A lot of propaganda consists of unsubstantiated rumors or speculation.

Sometimes it is helpful to read unsubstantiated rumors or speculation because it is notable. For example, the United States recently claimed that a foreign power was targeting its diplomats with a high powered microwave weapon. Substantial evidence was never produced, but American news media reported the story uncritically. I think that much of the reporting on this topic was disinformation or propaganda. At the same time, if I wanted to read about it, I would expect search engines not to make the editorial decision to censor this reporting. Even if it is disinformation, informed people should be aware of these accusations. In this case, I don’t expect the search engine to return the “truth” but rather “what is being said on this topic.”

> This is a weird stance to take about a search engine which is "tell me what to read as a service."

If users don't like the change in the search engine algorithm (for whatever reason), they'll stop using the search engine. It's not a weird stance to take.

At the very least this HN submission is surfacing search engine competitors like Startpage, Brave, and Kagi.

People can want a search engine that does stuff without running it through a Politburo filter. For a very long time that was the social norm in search engines. DDG marketed itself as "we follow the old norm, pick us and not the other bad guys." Now they are adopting the political censorship norm, contrary to their earlier marketing.

There's a difference between a low level filtering algorithm and manually curated results based on politics.

Of course, the right way to do it is to survey the common elements of sites whose politics you don't like and then add an "unbiased" content-agnostic rule punishing those elements.

What if I just want my tools to work and not come with land mines that at best are a distraction?

> Also, absolutely zero of the standard base of Duck Duck Go users are the kind of people who don't understand what a Russian state controlled news site is

DDG advertises on billboards, on the radio, on TV, etc. They are absolutely trying to attract an audience who doesn't all know what RT or Sputnik are.

You echoed my thoughts and thanks for the alternative. Ive been a user of DDG for years and have recommended it to people constantly.

Unfortunately since DDG caved today, they’ll certainly cave in the future. Its just a matter of time.

> Also, absolutely zero of the standard base of Duck Duck Go users are the kind of people who don't understand what a Russian state controlled news site is, and why one would have to be careful reading it.

You sure about that? I keep hearing about the Jan 6ers being big DDG users. They seem like the types that aren't too savvy when it comes to misinformation.

Exactly. The qanon conspiracy nuts have been pushing DDG as an alternative to Google for a while now, and they most definitely don't have that awareness. In fact, they tend to get ridiculously defensive when offering the thought that RT is no less "big bad MSM" than their usual targets.

Why use startpage? Google’s results are biased in both political and non-political ways.

All else being equal (and now they are with DDG admitting bias), google is better

> The arrogance of these people is astounding.

The arrogance to think that DDG should change their business to revolve around you personally is astounding.

I'm curious what you think the value of this comment is.

You aren't trying to convince the person you responded to.

The rest of us in the "I really liked DDG but am upset by this decision" bucket aren't the targets of this either.

Even other users who are less opinionated on this move inherently want DDG to care about them as users!

Do you think there is some squad of super pro-corporation folks your point is selling to? "Ah yes, well, if it helps DDG make a buck, it doesn't matter how I the user feel..."

The poster threw a temper tantrum so I wanted to point out their ironic arrogance.

It's also a bit tone deaf considering current events in Europe right now. This goes a little further than merely down ranking different opinions- these are weapons in a war that's currently being waged.

They just murdered any goodwill they had built up.

I just switched to Yandex (Russian search). At least Yandex doesn't pretend to be something that it isn't.

So you think it‘s better to use a search engine openly spewing propaganda than one that tries to curb it?

It sounds like the Putin fans who seem to like him „because he‘s a strong willed man who does not change his mind“ as if that was some kind of qualification.

Your second paragraph is unnecessary.

Different filters for different purposes.

Results are often banned by topic or keyword, not publisher or context.

At this point I don't trust US search engines not to censor official public statements and announcements from the US government.

What? Do you do this in other elements of your life?

“I’m not going to drink this veggie smoothie because they started adding honey and I don’t think sugar is healthy. I’m going to drink soda where at least they don’t try to hide that you’re drinking sugar.”

Yes, I do this with other parts of my life. One of the most frustrating experiences I ever had grocery shopping was when I tried to buy "fancy" mayonnaise at whole foods. I was trying to cook something "nice" and wanted to get the good stuff, so that's where I went.

The package said in bold letters, "Mayonnaise!" or some such, and what I didn't realize until I got home was that it wasn't actually mayonnaise, but some sort of vegan/literally not mayonnaise alternative.

I wanted mayonnaise, I asked for mayonnaise, and I got something whole foods thought was healthier.

Now when I'm shopping at WF (rarely), I am extra vigilant about making sure that what I am seeing on the label is actually what I am getting in the container. In fact, I try to avoid "fancy" alternatives to normal foods, because I find that they often replace normal ingredients with things they think are better for me.

But I don't want that! I just want mayo, just give me mayo!

I've also had this where I buy sour cream, or cottage cheese, and get home to find out that it has, in tiny letters, "reduced fat sour cream!" - NO! I want the fat in that sour cream or cottage cheese, that's literally why I'm buying it!

edit: interestingly the mayo was actually called "just mayo", but that's newspeak. It literally is not mayo at all, it is a substitute for mayo that they think tastes similar. So "JUST MAYO" actually contains nothing that is mayo.

OK, I could see using Yandex to search for Russian content.

This is interesting. From Wikipedia on "Just Mayo" [0]:

"On October 31, 2014, Unilever (parent company of competing brand Hellmann's/Best Foods) filed a lawsuit against Hampton Creek for false advertising, arguing that Just Mayo cannot be marketed as mayonnaise because it does not meet the definition of the product specified by the Food and Drug Administration.[citation needed] The FDA requires that "mayonnaise" contain 65% vegetable oil and at least one egg yolk-containing ingredient; Just Mayo contains ingredients such as pea protein, beta-carotene, and modified food starch, none of which are used in mayonnaise according to FDA standards.[19] Unilever also noted the use of egg-oriented imagery in its promotional materials, and stated that its false claims were "part of a larger campaign and pattern of unfair competition by Hampton Creek to falsely promote Just Mayo spread as tasting better than, and being superior to, Best Foods and Hellmann's mayonnaise." Hampton Creek CEO Josh Tetrick denied any wrongdoing, believing that Unilever's lawsuit was meant to solely hinder competition.[13][20]

"On December 18, 2014, Unilever dropped the lawsuit so Hampton Creek could work with "industry groups and appropriate regulatory authorities" on resolving its labelling, while also complimenting the company for its "commitment to innovation and its inspired corporate purpose."[21] In August 2015, the FDA sent Hampton Creek a formal warning that Just Mayo's labeling was misleading due to the product not meeting the standards for "mayonnaise", and because of wording on the packaging and promotional materials that contained an "implied health claim that these products can reduce the risk of heart disease due to the absence of cholesterol," which cannot be included as it contains too much fat to be promoted with such statements.[19]

"In December 2015, Hampton Creek announced that it had agreed to revise its packaging for Just Mayo in order to comply with the FDA's recommendations. The new label contains more prominent statements surrounding the nature of the product, and contains an explanation that the word "Just" in the product's name is defined as being "guided by reason, justice, and fairness."[22][23]"

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_Mayo

censorship is not a veggie smoothie. stopped reading there

You are absolutely right. Such hubris on Gabriel Weinberg's end. Today marks the last day I will ever be using DDG.

We knew they weren't really actually in it for privacy anyway. This just settles it.

“ Seriously what the f*ck makes Gabriel Weinberg think that myself, or anyone else, gives a damn about his personal opinion on what I should and should not be reading.”

he doesn’t care, he’s just another rich baby that needs to project his own stupidity onto the workers whose labor creates his upper class lifestyle

I'm glad you brought that up. I feel the class warfare aspect of these things is under appreciated.

Is anyone really that surprised? Beware companies that sell virtue. They tend to be the least virtuous. Don't be evil? Easily one of the most evil companies to have ever existed. When DDG's prime selling point was not their service but their "virtue", you knew it was a shady company. Though I do hope DDG, Bing, etc are able to gain some market share to break google's stranglehold on search, DDG is at heart no better than google morally. They are out to make a buck, nothing more, nothing less, like google. If you think DDG cares one lick about your privacy or free speech, then you are fooling yourself.

Any alternatives? Open source search...?

Alternatives? like you are really longing for lies?

I don't want others decide for me what is truth and what is lie. Others become corrupt, compromised (did it go well for Russians?).

I want to see what RT and Sputnik News are saying. And the misinformation published by them is no more common than the misinformation published by mainstream media sources.

Prior submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30624320

Brave Search has been gradually improving and I'm pleased with the quality of their results as of late. I encourage folks to give it a spin.

You might want to give Kagi a try. I've been using it for a few weeks and I think it's better than Google for my needs.

Thanks, Will definitely give it a shot.

Unfortunately also seems US based, and at this point I'm not ready to put any long term trust in US based companies remaining unbiased.

They use google search API for their results so it's really rebranded google with tweaks on top.

There's really nowhere reliable on the web you can get non-Western sanctioned news about the Russia-Ukraine conflict. If you are interested in alternative viewpoints, don't bother with any of the search engines. All the sources I've seen are on, e.g. Telegram.

Aljazeera?

South China Morning Post, Al Jazeera. I'm sure there are others.

This is an odd viewpoint. To me, "news" means "what is happening". I'm aware that the American news media does tend to mix a fairly heavy dose of opinion into that, but that isn't your only choice. The wire services like AP, or non-US news organizations like the BBC or Japan's NHK provide alternatives.

But these aren't "alternative viewpoints". They're just news with less opinion. Are you actually looking for news? Or different opinions?

News may be filtered to create skewed view. Note that the "alternatives" you list are all from US or its allies.

To be honest age of DuckDuckGo as alternative search engine is over.

I switched to Brave Search and not going back. It's giving me better results, along with quick Google link to jump to Google if needed (instead of manually typing !g before result). And they maintain own independent search index compared to DuckDuckGo, which gets most of it's results from Bing.

Their results are scraped from users using Google so I wouldn’t call it independent and I wonder how long it will last.

Based on this, if you have a distaste for censorship, you probably should use Brave Search instead of DuckDuckGo. [1]

Also, if you are using DuckDuckGo to avoid gargantuan corporations, you should know that they are essentially Bing with some extra perks. Brave Search has its own index, it only falls back to Bing when it doesn't have enough results (which they claim happens only for a minority of queries).

[1]: https://nitter.net/BrendanEich/status/1501978488043020292#m

Falls back to Google actually and semi-independent as explained here: https://seirdy.one/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-indexe...

Thanks for the interesting link. It might be slightly outdated about Brave Search though. In the tweet I linked to above they say:

> For <10% of queries where we don't have good results, we rely on Bing presently, so that fallback could be censored.

Google fallback is opt-in, Bing fallback is automatic.

As soon as Brave has more than a handful of users, they will quickly metamorphize into their Do Evil phase. We are currently watching that transformation at DDG. The point is that there is no place left to turn to.

Is there any statement from Microsoft since or beyond that from Feb 28 where they mention de-ranking search results from two news sites, on Bing?

https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2022/02/28/ukraine...

Anyone upset about down ranking propaganda need to get their priorities straight. Why would you want to use a search engine that serves intentionally bad information?

Right. The problem with every "free" system is that is it will be eventually exploited by bad actors for fun and profit. At first, people were exploiting SEO to make money, now they are using it to gain power and influence.

Considering rags like WSJ, NY Times, Economist, CNN and Al Jazeera doesn’t have the same consequences it seems like the only propaganda you’re opposed to is the propaganda you disagree with.

What makes you think I wouldn't want any of those sites also down ranked?

...but they're not. It's not even an optional "exclude [x] media" filter, it's a forced political viewpoint on the search results. That's what people -- including myself -- are unhappy with.

First let me just say, nobody wants to see bad information, intentional or not (unless they want to get an understanding of what the propaganda is).

My reasons to be upset are

1. What they call misinformation / disinformation may turn out to be accurate in the future

2. I have no way of knowing what they are actually removing. They may call stuff that they just don't like disinformation

3. I want to hear not just one side of an argument. You can't form a fully fledged understanding of a complicated subject like this without seeing the other side.

Maybe this won't be a popular opinion here -- but it seems to me that there should be a search engine that actively acts with intentional bias to weed out publishers and websites that, according to that search engine's standards, simply aren't worth listing in their search engine.

Kind of a hybrid search engine, and curated list of websites.

Google set the standard by trying to make everything algorithmic. I can't help but think that most people would be served better if there was a search engine in the market that actively curated the listings.

I'm not saying that such a search engine should be the only option, but I do think that it could be a valuable addition to the search landscape.

True, but very specific human intervention is very different to web scale algorithms. The algorithms are to an extent beyond accountability at a human level, but human intervention isn't.

Google is known to have 10's of thousands of "quality raters" for web pages. But they follow an algorithm. They will still have their own biases though. Not every one of them will rate pages the same.

The lines are very muddy for sure, but to say "I don't like this country and what it's saying and we're actively going to demote content ... somehow... " is the kind of manipulation that DDG users seem to be strongly disagreeing with. Particularly so with DDG because their entire index is Bing, and who knows whether they're doing the same? I would wager DDG does not know.

4 years ago I switched from Google to DDG, only occasionally using !g switch.

This is a bad move by DDG.

I used DDG in the past, because they did not tamper with the search results. Privacy is secondary to me. Now I switch to another search engine.

"they did not tamper with the search results"

DDG has always been bold about downranking and deleting spam.

Good! One more reason for me to remain a DDG user. This is the behaviour of responsible and accountable adults.

"Censoring" is a word very badly understood and prone to manipulation.

There are a lot of circumstances where suppression of information/opinion is justified: protecting intellectual property and copyrights, blocking doxing, prevent haters from doing harm against others, protection of military secrets or people in danger, etc.

In case someone hasn't noticed, there is a war going on in Europe. That is a circumstance where some of these cases apply.

Also, freedom of speech is a principle applied on the relation of people with the state, an issue for public law. This is about a private enterprise and its relations with its users, subject to the regulation of private law.

If this sounds just like "legalese" to you consider this: a newspaper has the right to select and editorialize the news it publishes, a bookseller has the right to choose what books to sell, a movie theatre or a movie producer also has rights to choose what to exhibit or produce. The same principle applies to what dang does here at HN.

So why shouldn't DDG have the right to choose what search results to display?

> In case someone hasn't noticed, there is a war going on in Europe. That is a circumstance where some of these cases apply.

There's a saying: "Truth is the first casualty in war." The last thing I want during a war is censorship. Why should I magically start trusting the government and media now?

> If this sounds just like "legalese" to you consider this: a newspaper has the right to select and editorialize the news it publishes, a bookseller has the right to choose what books to sell, a movie theatre or a movie producer also has rights to choose what to exhibit or produce. The same principle applies to what dang does here at HN. > > So why shouldn't DDG have the right to choose what search results to display?

DuckDuckGo isn't a publisher. They are a search engine. And nobody is claiming that they don't have the right to do what they are doing. But by doing so they are just like the search engines everyone is trying to escape from. Sure, you might get privacy but who cares if the results are manipulated?

> They are a search engine.

Exactly. people go to search engines looking for information about things. If the search engine returns lies it's completely failed.

> who cares if the results are manipulated?

Not sure if you've noticed, but there's an entire industry built around manipulating search engine results. If the search engines don't fight back the only thing that will be left is corporate and government bullshit.

> If the search engine returns lies it's completely failed

If I search for Time Cube, should a search engine refuse to show me a link to its webpage?

Maybe.

> If the search engine returns lies it's completely failed.

How does a search engine know what is true?

Truth is also a casualty when all truth is drowned out by a deluge of lies and nonsense. It's not as simple as you wish. You want to live in a trustless society where there needs be no curation of truth, but it's simply not practical, and it never has been.

And once again you completely ignore the problem of who gets to decide what it means to be biased or truthful? I'm sure you think you're biases are implicitly good, but there's no way in hell I would ever let you control the information that would be filtered on my screen given your ideological views

I'm not ignoring it, I'm just not going to pretend the actual solution is "no one decides" because that's nonsense. Hard problems don't go away because you don't like them. Not censoring misinformation isn't going to work, period. Some trust is required for society to operate at its current scale.

I don't get the comparison with newspapers, maybe 40 years ago that was one of the limited ways of information discovery but we've had the web since then. People are free to discover the world's information and given the saturation of that information, differing points of view on it. However, with two dominant search engines (Google and Bing/DuckDuckGo/Yahoo) there is little diversity and so censorship has more impact, at least in web discovery and navigation.

The internet is probably the biggest threat democracy has ever faced. I am ok with your romantic point of view of the informed masses but it’s a fallacy that in the end will cost us all our future. Because these people live and engage in extreme bubbles they get sucked into no matter if it’s left or right. I can only urge everyone who is for total tolerance to read K. Poppers the “Open Society and it’s Enemies” quite fitting from 1945.

Not quite sure I'm following. The "romantic point of view of the informed masses but it’s a fallacy" may apply to push techs like social media feeds more than search engines.

There aren't that many universal truths when it comes to political situations. Asking a search engine what time of day it is in Tokyo, the GDP or Ghana or whatever is entirely more objective.

I would say the onus is on people to understand sources of information and how to interpret them. If we're in a position where you're saying X% of the population will swallow what they search for, that makes search engines extremely dangerous, making the search engine an arbiter of truth is questionable. Does anyone at DDG have in depth knowledge of the political situation in Eastern Europe or what is truth and not? I would guess not, so they've no way of measuring it. It doesn't help that DDG's entire results are Bing's, who knows whether Bing is already pre-filtering them? I would guess DDG do not know that.

> I don't get the comparison with newspapers,

The point is not newspapers "per se".

The point is private entity, as opposed to public state. As I stated clearly, freedom of speech is a principle applied upon public law, not private law. Therefore, "censorship" is something the state does, not something private parts do among themselves.

Are anti-spam filters "censorship"? No, because they're implemented by private citizens to benefit other private citizens.

> Therefore, "censorship" is something the state does, not something private parts do among themselves.

Censorship is not defined with respect to the right of free speech; public censorship may be where those two issues collide, but it's not the only kind of censorship.

Censorship is not just the sole domain of a government. Private entities are perfectly capable of participating in it. You're conflating two distinct ideas.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_censorship

> In case someone hasn't noticed, there is a war going on in Europe. That is a circumstance where some of these cases apply.

Indeed, there's a war going on and there's a tremendous amount of propaganda being circulated from both sides. The question is, why is DDG okay with amplifying Ukranian/NATO propaganda and not Russian propaganda? Is it because NATO is the "good" guy and Russia is the "bad" guy?

When the US invaded Iraq in 2003, they did so on completely fabricated pretenses. The amount of death and destruction the US inflicted on the people of Iraq was horrifying. If DDG had existed back then, which side should they have taken? The side of the violent invaders (the "good" guys) or the side of the Iraqis (the "bad" guys)?

> So why shouldn't DDG have the right to choose what search results to display?

Of course they have the right to choose whatever they want, however this move seems antithetical to their original mission. If I wanted US-centric state-approved search results, I could just use Google.

I can't agree more.

As a child I was brainwashed by US propaganda living on the western side of the Iron Curtain. The 'home of the brave and land of the free'. How lo g it took me to remove this naive Hollywood image of our friend the US from my mind.

It took many long evenings of talking to actual people from the US while in university to learn more about the individual truths and lives instead of my rose tinted image.

To me personally for many years now the US were the biggest danger to peace on this planet. Now - taking a page from their playbook their old arch enemy is rearing its head and using the frigging same arguments the US used back in Iraq to sow war on European soil.

I am already only "allowed" (I know I can access other sources - it just isn't easy nor mainstream compatible) to watch western news.

Russian propaganda is more or less banned from German viewers (with RT and others being banned). I am not allowed to try to glimpse the way Putin wants to be seen internally.

And now - after Bing and Google - DDG follows suit and declares me too naive to be able to deal with Russian propaganda while still listing all the Western BS that should fill my head instead. Because in the end most 'news' currently is nothing but propaganda. Most news have an agenda.

There is nearly no good signal. Nearly only noise.

But few of the best sources to understand the mindset of the power elite in Russia I read in the last months were Russian sources read with the knowledge of the intended reason of publication. Aka reading it as the propaganda it is.

> Russian propaganda is more or less banned from German viewers (with RT and others being banned).

is rt.com also banned?

I just tested with three providers (two mobile, one landline). In all three cases the requests timed out.

Yes, the EU required internet providers to ban RT and other Russian state media. Elon Musk notably tweeted that Starlink was going to attempt to fight the censorship.

Interesting. I thought only authoritarian regimes decide for citizens what they should or should not watch.

The Iraq war was wrong and stupid, it should never have happened. But that's just whataboutism. It doesn't make the Ukraine war or Russian disinformation any better to point out that the United States have messed up spectacularly more than just once.

One difference, though, is that GWB never put anyone in prison for talking about the Iraq "war" or about how much the US government lied about WMD.

> Is it because NATO is the "good" guy and Russia is the "bad" guy?

I don't know that NATO is the "good" guy, but Ukraine is in this story (and they're not part of NATO). I'm saddened that it took about 2 days of everybody being in shock about the war until all the Russia apologists started re-emerging. One nation is brutally attacking another sovereign nation in complete violation of all international law and at the same time threatening the world with nuclear war. To me it's clear who the "bad" guy is.

The central point is that you need access to information to determine if a war is wrong and stupid. It is clear how censorship and propaganda can alter perception of who is the the good or bad guy.

And what happens when you can't tell what "information" is true in any reasonable timeframe, making it impossible for normal people (or actually anyone at all) to discern fact from fiction? Tough titty, those people just get to believe misinformation? It's not anyone's responsibility to suppress lies? I will never agree with that position. In a better world, the truth can be identified just by reading carefully. This isn't that world.

Who’s who to decide what’s True and what’s False? No one should be in that position of power, only you. You want to be taken care of, but your caregivers are wolves in disguise. Power breeds parasites. Long live anarchy

>And what happens when you can't tell what "information" is true in any reasonable timeframe, making it impossible for normal people (or actually anyone at all) to discern fact from fiction

My sweet summer child...

We crossed that line a long time ago. Everything is already lies and half truths.

Giving one group a monopoly on “truth“ doesn't help.

Every president the US has had have no problem standing in front of the country and telling bold-faced lies

The only way to get any semblance of truth is to pick through the the misinformation from multiple sides.

Having an official narrative and disallowing alternatives only prevents this process

Giving up completely doesn't help either, my sweet summer child. Pretending we can just let anyone say anything unchecked isn't actually a solution, it's a dodge because you don't want to have to trust. There's no way around having trust.

>There's no way around having trust.

Yes there is. The alternative is open information and critical evaluation. This isn't giving up.

I consider trusting censors to decide what information can be consumed to be giving up. Blindly thinking whatever you are told is the truth.

Who do you trust to limit the information you consume?

If a war is just a TV news about no-one-really-cares part of Europe it's easy to treat it as another topic for debate and partisan discussion about USA. Because from my perspective this is main shift of the discussion - Russia, Ukraine, other bordering countries and their complicated history - they are being pushed away to discuss USA politics.

I see refugees every day, on train station and in line near passport office, and I know how Russia influences politics of my country for years, and well, not for the better. I'm also not the biggest fan of USA, but it's really weird seeing how the whole story about Russia influence becomes basically "USA was worst".

Given the information controls since Vietnam we have been lucky so far. This may well have been triggered by regulatory grumblings and could be a sign of greater US involvement.

At least to me it feels similar to how big tech does weird things under gag orders.

I can guess once this is in place we can expect government mandated rationing with chips diverted to weapons.

> The question is, why is DDG okay with amplifying Ukranian/NATO propaganda and not Russian propaganda?

Because one side is busy shelling and starving civilians right now? Are you seriously suggesting that "NATO propaganda" (WTF?) and Russian propaganda are somehow equivalent?

There is very, very obviously a "bad guy" here, and most of the world (even outside the US/NATO sphere of influence) seems to agree on this point.

Here's an unclassified 82 page report on NATO information operations [1], which designates a role for a Deception Officer and indeed defines that,

>Deception involves measures designed to mislead adversaries by manipulation, distortion or falsification.

Nor is the overall function limited to the "adversary", for example on page 23 you can read that Info Ops are performed to create "desired effects on the will and understanding of...approved parties", which include "potential adversaries, decision makers, cultural groups, [and] elements of the international community".

I'm not saying that NATO is necessarily in the wrong to do these things in this situation, but it's certainly a bit naive to think that both sides are not fighting in the information space.

[1] https://info.publicintelligence.net/NATO-IO.pdf

“ Because one side is busy shelling and starving civilians right now?”

well technically the ukranians were doing the shelling first, starting on february 17th, killing ethnic russians in donbas. but you probably dont know that bc of the censorship. so basically you want propaganda amplified because you arent aware it’s propaganda, and have no way of figuring out it’s propaganda bc you want everything else to be censored.

“ There is very, very obviously a "bad guy" here, and most of the world (even outside the US/NATO sphere of influence) seems to agree on this point.”

no not really, china and india dont agree and thats half the world

> well technically the ukranians were doing the shelling first, starting on february 17th, killing ethnic russians in donbas.

Many sources argued both in advance and at the time that these were false-flag attacks designed to create a pretext for the invasion. (Eg, https://www.voanews.com/a/shelling-mortar-fire-intensify-in-...)

So the accusation of propaganda can go either way.

But that's exactly the point. DDG is in no position to verify any of it. We need to learn this cycle on our own skin: Read something, get outraged, then read a study proving it was false, learn not to get automatically outraged. Repeat.

Censoring is keeping adults in informational childhood state.

> Because one side is busy shelling and starving civilians right now?

And Ukraine had been doing that since 2014 to Donetsk and Luhansk

What does that make them? "Good guys"?

What about US helping Saudi Arabia commit genocide in Yemen what does that makes them?

What was presented as shelling of women's hospital by Ukrainian side is presented as shelling of evacuated hospital building that was being used to station troops.

I'm not going to try to answer the question who is lying here. But I do prefer to see both sides' cases. I think it could help with the tribal ecstasy everyone seems to be in at the moment.

A few years ago it was already apparent that there would be a Russian reaction to some western dealings within Ukraine. It became true and was obvious. The only surprise is the decisiveness and direct invasion, the rest should not be something that fell out of the sky.

The whataboutism is incredibly strong here.

As a sibling said: there is a side with justice and truth on their side, and it’s not Russia.

Russia attacked Ukraine. Russia has been bombing, is bombing, and continues to bomb residential areas, hospitals, and schools in Ukrainian towns. The lies that the Kremlin spouts are so far-fetched that some Right-wing outlets here in the US parrot those lies as truth - “Nazis”, etc.

Russia also has a very powerful misinformation machine that is working now more than ever.

So I’ll take a little amplification of Ukrainian/NATO propaganda. At the very least, their claims of self-defense more than check out.

You're not wrong that they absolutely have the right to choose what results to display. Just like Twitter has the right to choose what content appears on their platform, and same with YouTube, etc. But my opposition is not from a legal standpoint, it is from a moral standpoint. I just think censorship and cancellation is wrong and immoral, even if it is legally allowed. I think it is immoral for some business executive to make sweeping decisions about what the commoners are / aren't allowed to see - it opens the door to far more dystopian control of our society.

If you think censorship is wrong then it follows that you would think that the Russian state is wrong given that they are going as far as denying this is even a war, and actively censoring those that call it one. Are you saying that you're still keen for them to be allowed to do so?

Yes, I say let their lies be defeated in the marketplace of free ideas. Basically everyone knows what's going on with Russia at this point. I don't think suddenly censoring their lies now is really gonna change anything.

People keep saying these kinds of things, but Russians had pretty open access to western ideas, news, propaganda, and history, but that didn't stop a huge chunk of them from either tacitly or explicitly approving of this invasion of a sovereign nation. People believe what they want to believe, not what is correct.

People keep saying "sunlight is the best disinfectant" (despite that not even being a reasonable statement in terms of disinfectants) but Russians have had access to "sunlight" for literally decades and this still happened.

It's the same with how people believed we could save china by exporting capitalism, as if that would change things. The fact of the matter is that information, misinformation, and propaganda are game theoretic; a purposely bad actor that isn't ACTIVELY pushed back against will have huge success.

Hell, it even happens here in the states. Both Fox News and MSNBC are perfectly legal to produce and view here, and yet no matter what you say on either station, roughly half of the country will believe it. That's a pretty terrible disinfectant if you ask me.

That’s a complete derailment. This is about the experience that search users should have. If they want to search for “russia official statements ukraine” then they should get results about that.

The fact that Russia has decided to outlaw the truth is completely besides the point.

Results on Google and DDG for that query are pretty similar and mostly Western sources written in English, responding to Russian official statements.

I’d be curious if there were other search terms that had a clearer difference in rankings between Google and DDG based on this new policy.

> The fact that Russia has decided to outlaw the truth is completely besides the point.

It's not when we're talking about whether search results produced by the state which banned telling the truth should be given equal weight to search results by media which is allowed to tell the truth (even though it doesn't always do so) in search rankings

It's not difficult to find official statements from Russia on the Ukraine war including via DDG, without going down the rabbit hole of insisting that if someone searches for "shelling Kyiv" there's no reason why websites pushing the narrative that Kyiv isn't being shelled shouldn't outrank news items of Kyiv being shelled if their SEO is good enough.

> I think it is immoral for some business executive to make sweeping decisions about what the commoners are / aren't allowed to see

I used to have this point of view, but it's clear lately that certain types of information do not result in good outcomes if processed by the uneducated.

The U.S. is already going in the direction of a dystopia if you haven't noticed. More free speech isn't going to help gas, housing, or educational prices, but it does enable various actors at little to no cost to themselves to freely shit out emotional, illogical, and invective dreck on various platforms and prevent honest analysis and discussion from happening on numerous issues. If all of this is a guaranteed benefit to society it's getting harder and harder to see to lately.

I think the young people growing up today, who cannot afford a place to live, who have to go into years of debt just to get started, who are being looked down by previous generations for not starting a family when they literally don't have the resources to do it, are going to look at things vastly differently and really care less about this sort of thing from a hard absolute perspective.

> I used to have this point of view, but it's clear lately that certain types of information do not result in good outcomes if processed by the uneducated.

I am watching a lot of historic documentaries. I studied history (and literature) originally. I read a lot of historic sources and accounts.

This argument, that the powerful and educated need to protect the dumb masses by censoring what they are allowed to know/read isn't new. It is used by the powerful way before the medieval age but was (just to name an example) used by the catholic church against the translation of the Bible. It was used by western governments during the cold War. It is still used by the British government with their ability to silence editorial boards on specific topics. It was used by the US against Wikileaks. It was used by the GDR against their own people who also were officially banned from watching western TV/listen to western radio. It was used by western Germsn media when they decided to not publish the RAF terrorists' letters where they declared their reasoning for bombs or killings.

I don't buy it in historic context and I don't buy it today.

It's not about protecting the dumb masses, it's about protecting the non-dumb from the dumb. Any ideology, set of rules, etc. can be abused to the extent where its harmful, so that's not the point. I'm not sure I want a government to be making those types of decisions, but I have no problem if a private platform does.

You had clearly already decided that all of these societal ills where either caused by bad information being processed by “the uneducated” or would be worsened by it. So this comment says more about how you view the uneducated than it says about the merits and demerits of censorship.

Yes, it does.

I'm ok with this as long as I get to be the gatekeeper. Otherwise I would prefer we look at principles instead of consequences. Let's stand by our principles even if it dooms us.

> I just think censorship and cancellation is wrong and immoral, even if it is legally allowed. I think it is immoral for some business executive to make sweeping decisions about what the commoners are / aren't allowed to see

HN mods actively hide and remove content, including political content from sites like RT & Sputnik: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I don't think anyone is accusing HN of censorship or making oppressive decisions about what the commoners can / can't see. It's accepted that some level of curation and guidelines are needed to foster a healthy environment.

DDG (and HN) are not a public square, they're private companies conducting business according to their individual desires and motivations.

It would be equally folly to force HN to host political content as it would to tell DDG how they can and can't alter their proprietary ranking algorithms.

Censorship is really a problem when the government (or a monopoly) starts censoring content, with the ability to enforce that censorship nearly or practically universally. Until then, the free market will do it's work.

Hacker News is not a search engine.

It has search and I’ve used it as one.

Hacker News is a site with a specific niche audience. If this is your only source of news I'm afraid you're getting a very one-side picture on many topics. A search engine on the other hand is supposed to present the information you seek from various sources, so you can read different opinions.

Maybe that’s your definition of a search engine. Mine is that it returns high quality results that achieve my goals.

If I’m asking a question, I want the answer to the question. If I’m researching a topic, I want a mix of simple and robust reliable information.

I use HN as a search engine for things tech/startup related. It’s curated and that works well.

I have no problem using a search engine that down-votes unreliable sources, yet still provides access to them if I search directly. That more correlates with helping me solve my problems than making me filter out spam, scams and propaganda.

Those that need legal force to adhere to the principle of freedom of expression simply do not support it. They often believe that they do, but in all relevant metric they certainly do not.

> So why shouldn't DDG have the right to choose what search results to display?

Oh they absolutely should, but they aren't free from consequence. And users will give them feedback on how they feel about it by voting with their feet, or searches, lack thereof in this case.

The problem is that their product was advertised as not doing this. They are totally free to do this, but it makes their whole product unfit for purpose.

It also makes you question if they actually value privacy.

> Comparing a search provider to a Journalism Outlet rather than a Librarian.

Well if you're going to start there its no surprise you reached the conclusion you did.

Librarians work for the state, therefore their acts are covered by public law that regulates censorship.

DDG is a private company, therefore their acts are covered by private law that doesn't regulate censorship.

I stated that before on my previous comment. I recommend you to improve your text comprehension skills, they're lacking.

Nice try. DuckDuckGo literally sold itself and became successful based off the promise of behaving more like a library than a journalist. The only thing you've pointed out so far is the obvious - they don't have a legal obligation to fulfill the premises they were built on. Great, as long as the free market is aware.

> "Censoring" is a word very badly understood and prone to manipulation.

Search results are also prone to manipulation. I suppose you could manipulate the search results for the word "censoring" to something that people who want to censor would prefer.

> prevent haters from doing harm against others

> Also, freedom of speech is a principle applied on the relation of people with the state, an issue for public law. This is about a private enterprise and its relations with its users, subject to the regulation of private law.

Have you been living under a rock? This narrow, don’t-tread-on-me version of freedom-of-speech has been criticized in the Zeitgeist for a good while now; many people want the same principles to apply to private as well as state actors, equally.

Most people talk about the concept of free speech. Not whatever federal law that deals with it in the US.

This narrow "Free Speech == First Amendment and nothing else" interpretation is quite common with those that advocate controlling the speech of others.

> Have you been living under a rock?

> has been criticized in the Zeitgeist

Zeitgeist? As in Twitter/FB/Whatsapp and other social networks' blabbering?

Then yes, I've been living under a rock. I proudly refuse to be part of that cacophony.

Well, you are on this site, no? I’m referring to the HN Zeitgeist (in part).

Would you be okay with media censoring content that opposed the Japanese internment because it was wartime during WW2?

>Also, freedom of speech is a principle applied on the relation of people with the state, an issue for public law. This is about a private enterprise and its relations with its users, subject to the regulation of private law.

This is absolutely not what the principle of free speech is. Private companies censoring information can be every bit as insidious and damaging to society, and of course falls under the umbrella of free speech. I think you are confusing free speech for the U.S. Constitution. This only applies to American speech, and only a narrow kind of speech. When someone on the internet describes or discusses "free speech," they are typically discussing something far broader.

DDG has the right to provide poor search results. Users here are lamenting that fact.

Imagine thinking that excluding literal disinformation when it is not requested is a poor search result. The job of the search engine is to provide people the information they want. Not showing people lies when they want facts seems to be exactly the correct decision.

I don't think most people would have an issue if DDG and whoever else only removed disinformation and they never had any false positives. The problem is DDG is not perfect and will censor real information while calling it disinformation.

Look at all the covid disinformation that turned out to be accurate or potentially accurate. The media and fact checkers have been completely awful at determining facts. Why do you think DDG will have any better luck?

First, define “disinformation.” Second, prove that only this disinformation is being suppressed. Lastly, prove that I don’t actually want to see some of this disinformation. I write articles and checking official Russian media is part of ensuring I’m writing factually.

Your problem is thinking that I don’t have the right to see media I want to see.

You think that ddg not showing as much disinformation is intruding on your right to see the media you want to see? You know that you can still find disinformation by explicitly searching for it right?

> excluding literal disinformation

Who decides what is literal disinformation?

> In case someone hasn't noticed, there is a war going on in Eurasia.

I thought it was Eastasia.

Wow you have no intelligence whatsoever. You're basically advocating for one team's propaganda because you don't like the other teams. YOU are the problem.

> So why shouldn't DDG have the right to choose what search results to display?

They do have the right to participate in censorship. I don’t see anybody suggesting otherwise. Now we know that they can no longer be trusted to serve unbiased information. And now we can tag your account as “pro censorship”.

Freedom of speech is a philosophical principle. Laws based on the philosophy have been written, but they are not the broader principle itself. The laws are just one instance of the principle.

So when we criticize a private actor for going against freedom of speech, we are not saying that they break the law, or that they aren't allowed to do what they do. They plainly are.

What we are saying is that we like the principle, and would like to see the private organization act so as to uphold the principle. This is especially true if they have advertised themselves as being pro the principle before but have backtracked since.

A huge part of DDG's position before was to escape your results being shaped for you by the search provider. Now DDG is doing that on top of whatever Bing does. Maybe they're just complying with EU sanctions that demand suppressing RT and Sputnik, but I haven't really seen/checked other communications by them on the subject.

EDIT: There's also the issue of determining what is factual and what is misinformation on a contested subject. Not easy, especially algorithmically, and something I'd rather do myself.

Can we hope this will lead to some transparency about what sites are donwranked; how they are misinformation or otherwise worth the downranking; and maybe even some insight into what facilities there are for weighting the rankings and how those are otherwise used?

Yeah... it's probably better to show a link saying "we downranked [...], click here to uncensor".

I think in this particular case it's a good thing as is, but next time I might not think that, and I'd rather have the "full shebang" available too.

Though, from a philosophical point of view, search engines are supposed to find us "good" content. They try to guess our intentions and serve up the stuff we should see. In this is a massive implication that search engines already make a lot of judgment calls; just usually along less identifiable features. Here they're explicitly crafting a feature called "disinformation" and downgrading on that basis. But otherwise, is it so different to rating based on other arbitrary criteria that we don't even have any insight into?

How does duck duck go know?

Do they have a link to the highest levels of governments with a team of experts certify what's true and what's false?

...Or are they algorithmically deranking sites that don't fit the narrative of their customer base?

Last one seems more likely.

This tangent of virtue signalling these last few years has been.... constant and tiring. Lately, every thing claiming to be a rebel is a tyrant.

There's a huge assumption here, that it's not useful to know or understand what Russia is saying. I'm not comfortable with insulating the western world from knowing what propaganda Russia is peddling.

Yegg followed up with an argument about relevancy of results:

"Search engines by definition try to put more relevant content higher and less relevant content lower -- that's not censorship, it's search ranking relevancy." – https://twitter.com/yegg/status/1501734648417865731

The other premise is that Russian disinformation is irrelevant by virtue of being disinformation – that a user of DDG wouldn't want to be manipulated if he somehow knew in advance that this would be the effect on him. Accepting that arguendo, what about the user explicitly looking for what Russia has to say? I asked Yegg if appending "russian perspective" would give Russian perspectives. I don't expect a reply but it seems clear to me that down-ranking sites is too blunt a tool to allow for this.

does this imply that you just need to scroll down to see the "Russian Perspective"?

DuckDuckGo is Bing, we know this because when Bing accidentally censored all image searches for "tank man", all image results disappeared from DuckDuckGo as well.

Bing already announced that they were doing this, so maybe DuckDuckGo doesn't have any choice about it.

https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/microsoft-rem...

> The company said it would not display any state-sponsored RT and Sputnik content, de-rank their search results on Bing and not place any ads from its ad network on those sites.

> maybe DuckDuckGo doesn't have any choice about it.

Did you read the linked tweet?

"At DuckDuckGo, we've been rolling out search updates that down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation."

Sounds like they very much had a choice, and chose censorship. If they didn't and are actually just subject to Bing's whims, then they're lying. Neither of those are good.

Yeah but just thinking about how this would work. For sites like DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, or Yahoo search, they don't have hundreds of engineers maintaining their own search engines, they must just call some Bing API. The Bing API must return the search results already ranked. (Otherwise what would be the alternative?) So the down-ranking of russian sites would happen upstream of DuckDuckGo.

Implementing a context based downranking policy on the results when they use a search engine (Bing) over which they probably have almost 0 ability to tweak or fine tune before the query sounds like an incredibly hard thing to do. You'd have to do a lot of contextual analysis and understand not only the query but also all the results the API gives you, after the search is already done. That seems even more complicated than just having your own search algorithms at that point.

It's possible but it's hard to believe they'd go through that effort and coincidentally come up with something very similar to what Bing started doing too. I don't want to assume they are lying but this can very well be just an attempt at free PR when the truth could be just that it wasn't their decision at all. ddg does not seem to be very upfront over their almost total reliance on Bing in the first place.

I mean IIRC when the tank man picture disappeared from bing and thus from DDG too, duckduckgo acknowledged the problem but it didn't seem like they could do anything about it but wait until Bing fixes the issue.

>chose censorship

This is not what the word "censorship" means.

How exactly is it bing? Refaced and operated by microsoft? Refaced and scrapped results from bing? Any more info on this?

When you do a search on DuckDuckGo, they query Bing using an API and show the results that Bing return. DuckDuckGo is mostly Bing with some extra "value-added" embellishments.

> Any more info on this?

https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so...

> We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from multiple partners, though most commonly from Bing (and none from Google).

> DuckDuckGo is Bing, we know this because when Bing accidentally censored all image searches for "tank man", all image results disappeared from DuckDuckGo as well.

We know it because they’re open about it. The information was public before that incident.

https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so...

DDG is already censoring. You won't f.x. find sanctioned-suicide.org when searching for "sanctioned suicide". But you can search that forum via the site keyword. Google completely removed that forum from its results.

It's hard to say - I suppose - what that tweet means practically. F.x. searching for "ukraine bio weapon laboratories". Will there be any sites discussing this without just dismissing it? And if yes, how deep are they buried? (https://twitter.com/i/status/1501306485183295488)

Was there a particular issue with people searching and ending up on russian propaganda? I guess the ones who did will still do. In any case it may not seem so but we are at war with USSR v2, at least that s what russia is doing so it helps to keep some perspective here. As long as media is ran by people they will have censorship/bias and there will be no absolute free speech, as it s pretty clear that the most dictatorial regimes make heavy use of internet propaganda. Still, i think those things are more like PR moves, and maybe not overall positive: Russian propaganda is transparent, vicious and unashamed

That's why I will keep using google. If I will use an orwellian search engine, at least I will use the original one.

Bad move. They could have used this to inform the user instead they broke their core philosophy. Very unhappy.

Looks like DDG and I are breaking up. I used DDG precisely to get around this kind of manipulation -- i can make my own assessments.

What good alternatives are there even left these days?

Wasn't DDG a privacy layer on bing? Does bing do this?

Is it actually common to seek information about news from a search engine? I find that kinda surprising.

I get news from outlets I'm already reasonably familiar with, so that I know how much to trust them, and what to trust them about.

It hadn't occurred to me that people might take apparently-factual information at face value when they find it via a search engine (without recognising the source site).

The whole point of a search engine is that it finds anything that any old person put on the internet, so why would anyone think a search engine is a reliable source of trustworthy assertions that accurately describe the real world?

Like, even in a physical library, just because a book is in the “factual” section doesn't mean that every assertion in the book is genuinely true — maybe it's out of date, or just plain wrong. All the library is asserting is that this book exists.

Twenty years ago people seemed to need to be told that, despite stuff on the internet being in written/printed form, that didn't automatically mean it was actually an authoritative newspaper. Have people forgotten that? Like, do people actually believe any old shite they read on the internet?

I no longer respect "principled stands" in anything infrastructure related (e.g. payments, dns, hosting, search). I want the algorithms that dictate our lives to be as free of politics as possible. If we are going to survive, politics has to be the sole domain of the people, and not companies or algorithms.

I am starting to think that internet utility companies is going to be a thing.

I personally don't like this move but seeing a lot other companies standing against Russia and applying similar "sanctions" makes me think they are doing this just for PR.

I'm absolutely not saying they shouldn't do anything to show support for Ukraine but a simple short sentence or small banner somewhere would be much better instead.

Russian propaganda includes most of the strongest valid criticisms of US propaganda. US propaganda does not.

I want to play the devil's advocate: this is bad for DDG, but AT LEAST we know that they are doing this. It would have been a lot worse if they just did it without saying a word about it, right?

Now, if I want to get unbiased info on the ongoing conflict I’ll just switch to Brave or something better.

Goodbye, DDG.

but what are the alternatives?

The selling point of DDG is "pro privacy" i.e. non-interference with its users, now that this is shown to be BS, there is no reason to use it. Might as well use Google/Bing for bigger features... But probably something better out there.

Their claim is literally:

> We don’t store your personal information. Ever.

> Our privacy policy is simple: we don’t collect or share any of your personal information.

They are absolutely maintaining their promise. There's no evidence on their site that they have a promise of "non-interference of [our] users". Whatever that means.

I read through a lot of articles on spreadprivacy.com looking for evidence to back up your claim, and came up with nothing.

>we don’t collect or share any of your personal information

Their lawyers must have a very specific definition of "share" in mind, since they are definitely exposing that information via how their ad system functions.

Kagi

They are in beta right now, If memory serves they will charge around 200usd/year

I will be happy paying that to avoid all that other free search engine bullshit, such as this perfect example of ddg destroying their own ethos for.... I am not even sure what they are getting in return for this

ESG points. Prepping for an exit?

So, how does this make any sense for ddg?

I don't get it, I really don't

Why would they self sabotage like this? Ever?

Maybe honest nationalism/"patriotism", maybe a phone call or a meeting with a VIP, maybe both.

Sometimes you can get as rich purposefully trashing a product as you can taking it to a moderate success. Look at Firefox.

Most of the comments here seem to have the same basic misconception. They think it is possible to act without bias. This is simply not possible -- even algorithms have bias.

For example, machine learning based on a human dataset will learn the human biases. This is well documented.

Instead of aiming for no bias -- it is better to explicitly outline one's biases, as well as how one is responding to those biases (or not).

The unfortunate situation, is that companies like DuckDuckGo, Google, etc, would like you to believe that they present "unbiased" results, despite the literal impossibility of this. Much better to make any and all biases explicit, so that nobody is deceived.

> Instead of aiming for no bias ...

It's not all or nothing. You can both minimize bias and explicitly outline biases.

So twitter and facebook getting down-ranked?

The war is two weeks old and some people seem to want to inject the news from Ukraine straight into their veins. That also makes it easier for disinformation and propaganda to spread. Both sides have an incentive to spread propaganda (although moreso for Russia since this is not a righteous war on their part by any stretch of the imagination).

The Wikipedia page for the Ghost of Kyiv currently says that some sources claim that it is “an urban legend or war propaganda”. “Urban legend” is the most frequent name that I’ve seen. It would have been called “disinformation” if it had been fighting on the Russian side.

I doubt that most Western sources will be as critical of falsehoods coming from the Ukrainian and Western side compared to the Russian side. If the Ukrainian/Western side gets labeled as simply “false” (intent unclear) while the falsehoods coming from the Russian side gets labeled as “disinfo” then I would imagine that DDG could downplay Russian falsehoods while leaving up Ukrainian/Western falsehoods.

Most Western media that I follow are very quick to point out that information from Ukraine is not necessarily trustworthy. They're quite likely to portray the situation in a way that makes it look like they're winning. The number of reported Russian casualties is very likely to be exaggerated and this is pointed out rather consistently.

My own state media frequently figure Zelinsky’s words on the front page/quoted on the news. Passed on uncritically.

The label "disinformation", like "terrorism" often depends on your individual context. "War propaganda" is a pretty accurate descriptor for that silly story. War propaganda isn't always meant strictly to misinform. Consider the "Eating carrots is good for your eyesight" trope produced by UK propaganda during WWII. One of it's goals was to cover up the success of radar in night conditions, but it also had the goal of encouraging citizens to grow more carrots in their victory gardens. Hilariously, retrospectively it can't even be called disinformation anymore because carrots DO contain a compound that is necessary for your eyes to operate in a healthy manner

This is a very good move on DDG's part. You can't have free information during a war.

It would be wrong during peace, but we can't afford this during the Russian rampage that's happening right now.

To shamelessly steal a comment from the user president:

Would you be okay with media censoring content that opposed the Japanese internment because it was wartime during WW2?

So, once again, no one is neutral. Companies decide who's bad and what's true. I'm not pro-trumpist, but a few years ago it hurt pretty bad, and it continues.

I wish search could be hierarchically visualized so I didn't have to page through several hundred articles of the exact same thing being reported for the exact same quotations for the exact same events. Deduplication, hierarchical organization would allow me to see true variance among a topic rather than use a very limited way of ranking relevance. I want perspective, not top 10 exact same things being said.

Right now I consider any news from the conflict area with a huge heap of salt.

But this move is a bad PR move by DDG. I don't need handhelding by a fucking search engine.

There aren't enough bits on the Internet nor hours in a day to cover every bit of news, so it is a given that every single source of news is biased. They have to choose what to cover, what not. This is fundamental reality.

Given that unbreakable constraint, all I ask is that the editorial choices are described. And in a perfect world, a toggle to turn them off if I really do want to see the flow of sewage.

I tried DDG for a few weeks... Google is still better, even though its as bad as it's ever been. Really need some disruption here.

DDGs search has gotten worse as it has gotten more active. I don't know this to be true, but it seems like their old search results felt too Wild West for prime time to them, so before they began the radio/tv/billboard ad blitz they changed things on the backend for the worse.

I want my window into the internet to be completely unmediated. A search engine should just search the web for information that you type in, and then show you the results. It should be a pure function. The opinions or desires of any corporation, advertiser, or government should not come into play.

Would such a search engine even be allowed to exist now?

Ask HN:

What queries are you using on DDG about Russia/Ukraine that are not returning the results you’re wanting?

And is Google providing better results?

Good default. Now give us a separate switch: "Russian Propaganda: on|off", similar to "Save Search".

DDG doesn't trust its users enough to allow us to have an unbiased algorithm? I will now stop using DDG.

I don't give a shit either way. But, damn, this backfired pretty bad for DDG.

Thanks DDG, time to try a different search engine. I was always doing !g anyway.

Why not provide a toggle that allows unfiltered results for those who want that?

This way, they can both filter out propaganda away from those who might be vulnerable and still let those who want it have it.

Maybe call it “controversial” similar to Reddit.

If I want to search for content about Ukraine, be it propaganda or not, where do I go? I'd like a view on the "raw" information without any filtering based on the domain.

How about no? Pathetic from DDG. If you work there you should be ashamed of yourself. I will find a new search provider that doesn’t decide which political content I can see.

So long, ducky. I have switched to Brave (until they give in to the propaganda machine, that is) and won't be coming back. This is a terribly misguided decision.

My question is: DDG is to Google, as ___ is to DDG. What is ___?

Google.

I recently discovered Kagi and got into the beta in the last week. So far I've been happy with the results.

https://kagi.com/

I haven't been very happy with my ability to find things with DDG or Google lately, if Kagi can deliver good search results, I'll happily pay whenever they go out of beta

Gice users a toggle. Give users the ability to choose whether they want sensored results or not. That would fix so many problems with slight tech and media.

Give us a fucking choice!

It's a sad day. I had hopes from DDG, but with this, they join the same train as the rest. There will be no unbias internet with this mindset.

I guess I will try out brave search for now. I don't want to deal with tech companies deciding what information is accurate or not.

Just give me a “this is irrelevant to my search” button on each result. And a “never show me results from this domain” button while you’re at it.

Quite sad this is happening so soon after they introduced translations. Looks like I’ll have to move on to something else again.

when shit hits the fan, the West is no better than a dictatorship. it's only a fluffy democracy when there is no danger and the war is far away. we got the "free" media blasting every line from the government without any scrutiny and social media silently censoring and re-ranking posts to fit the central party's narrative.

You know how you can tell who the good countries and bad countries are? People risk their lives trying to sneak into the good ones, and out of the bad ones. It's literally as simple as that.

Historically, which category has Russia fallen into?

If DDG could just start with downranking the stackoverflow scrapers to below actual stackoverflow (and related sites), thanks

Why not give user options? Like Reddit used to by giving user ability to block / filter certain topics.

Search is still not a solved problem. Maybe one day brain-computer-interactions will bring us closer

If I search for "yandex" on DDG, the russian search engine is the first thing that comes up, so...

There's another approach.

How about greater transparency around the trustworthiness of sources? Maybe that would be a better way than censorship to slow the rampant spread of misinformation across the internet?

Full disclosure, I work for Neeva. Our search engine is different. With Neeva, we give you more information about the source and you get to decide which news sources you trust. You are in charge of deciding what is right for you -- not global tech companies making decisions in private rooms.

Would much prefer if they just displayed a big warning on results that they have flagged as shit.

Frankly I’d find it much more acceptable to label so-called sources of misinformation and link to the evidence of their past transgressions. This is the only measure which is respectful of the kind of free exchange of ideas typical of a democratic society.

That so so many jump directly to banning, silencing, downranking tells me that we’re already in big trouble, as evidenced also by the heavy-handed coronavirus-related censorship, cancelling people, etc.

And DuckDuckGo has just lost it's only distinguishing feature (attempted neutrality).

Yandex was already my go to alternative to Google, this just reassured me in my choice

Truth is the first victim of war

Are you advocating for more news articles about how great Russia is for liberating the Nazi-subjugated people of Ukraine?

No (did that answer the kind of hidden but not ad hominem?)

That's not great. Fortunately there are plenty search engines to switch to.

Very disappointing. Search is about finding things, not about narrating things.

Fantastic, you've written in AI that is able to distinguish information from disinformation. Turing Award incoming, I expect.

Now, off to uninstall DDG.

Ah, so all that sweet talk about unbiased results was a lie? Surprise XD

Its really shocking to me just how many western companies have capitulated to the wholesale censorship and shunning of Russia for this war.

DDG and others snored through the bush era disinformation campaign that led to the war in Iraq that killed countless civilians, yet somehow have a sterling enough moral terpitude to suddenly care about truth now?

To be fair DDG was founded the year Obama took office.

they should go further: any search results pertaining to the russia ukraine war should be removed completely. it's all been flooded with noise, there is no utility in any of it.

While there is absolutely an enormous amount of misrepresentations or plain lies pushed by russian outlets, I'm worried that there might be too much temptation to use the current climate to control the narrative and label anything inconvenient as "disinformation".

I remember reading a few days ago a warning that cyber attacks of german government agencies are to be expected in the near future and that attackers could use the obtained knowledge in disinformation campaigns.

Of course enemy psyops could always use leaked information as a "grain of truth" to make a fabricated message seem more credible - however, I think if any kind of leaked classified information is automatically termed "disinformation", we went too far. At least, in such a climate, I don't know how something like the Snowden leaks would have been possible.

One problem with platforms having a clear bias in their search results is their classification of concepts like "disinformation" aren't what they say. They can't be. A business that needs to increase profits every quarter is never going to be charitably filtering data to get rid of "bad actors" (unless it's enforced by the law), they're going to do what they can to make more money. I don't think the owners of DDG are making this mistake maliciously. However, controlling information based on subjective opinions on narratives like the Russia/Ukraine conflict (which 99% of people talking about haven't even been to the region) is short sighted unless they're openly stating "We have a clear bias and are making our own claims on what good information is."

More and more incentive is emerging for niche search engines.

Goodbye duck duck go, One less search engine you can trust

DDG is a thin wrapper around Bing that makes it worse.

Oh well, duckduckgo falls to the propaganda machine.

This is an unequivocal good and should be applauded

Wow. Fuck this so much. I’m never using ddg again. I think I’m going to move towards searching specific sites rather than using a generic internet-wide search provider.

I will now stop using DDG because of this.

how much of the uproar over this is about implementation vs intent? disinformation isn't worth being returned when the user is seeking information. like if you are looking for the health impacts of soda, you probably don't want coke writing your answers.

I'm all for neutral platforms, but it feels like you either opt out of editorializing and end up with trash driven by SEO, or editorialize and marginalize some content producer or consumer. any play feels like a losing move from the business's perspective.

> DuckDuckGo's mission is to make simple privacy protection accessible to all.

The main job of a search engine is to give me results relevant to what I'm searching for. Privacy is obviously a nice feature but if the results suck, I'm not going to use your search engine so privacy doesn't matter.

Who are they to decide what is "disinformation". How do they know? I want to see all sides of a story and come to my own conclusions. I don't need big tech babysitting me.

Is this materially different from filtering other abuse like SEO spam? Would you choose to keep spam in your results to reach your own conclusion?

> Is this materially different from filtering other abuse like SEO spam?

Yes it is.

The undesirability of spam is much more universal than "misinformation", and its definition is much less controversial.

And we don't care whether the spam is Russian, American, Nigerian or whatever.

The motivation in this case is clearly more paternalistic compared to filtering spam.

Yeah I just don't agree with any of that.

Spam is infamously hard to identify and consistently define. My spam is your content. I'd argue what Russia is doing here is spam. They're laundering their message through media outlets with domains with much stronger SEO positioning than any official government domain. (You may disagree this is "spam" but that's kind of my point.)

Meanwhile I think there's pretty broad consensus that if you doing a general search (and not specifically seeking out opposing information or alternate views) that you do not want the top results to be intentionally false.

> My spam is your content.

Tell me of one person who wants to read unsolicited viagra offers and all that stuff.

> I'd argue what Russia is doing here is spam.

Problem is that there are a lot of half-truths embedded in pro-russian media outlets and many things that, how false they may be, seem to be their genuine viewpoints. I think it would be better to engage with that stuff and separate the half-truths from the lies instead of simply hiding everything away.

> Tell me of one person who wants to read unsolicited viagra offers and all that stuff.

The people who buy viagra from those unsolicited offers. Spammers have been offering that product for decades because it works. People buy it.

"Spam" is mostly just stuff you don't want to read.

> I think it would be better to engage with that stuff and separate the half-truths from the lies instead of simply hiding everything away.

It's not gone, it's just no longer near the top of a query for "what happened yesterday in Ukraine?" If you're looking for one answer to that question, Sputnik or RT is definitely not the best source.

> Who are they to decide what is "disinformation". How do they know?

Making decisions about which information to rank highly vs. lowly is, you know, kind of the definition of a search engine.

Yeah there's a lot of "anti censorship" warriors in this thread, who seem confused about what search engines are for

A search engine is for finding information.

Misinformation is a kind of information.

> there's a lot of "anti censorship" warriors in this thread

You say that as if being "anti censorship" is a weird, or bad thing. What reasonable person would agree that being "pro censorship" is an ideal stance?

Anti-spam utilities exist to filter out (aka "censor") spam. Disinformation is spam. I'm pro filtering spam and perhaps even a reasonable person. There you have it.

> Disinformation is spam.

I believe, at a fundamental level, this statement is far too ambiguous to be considered a reasonable conclusion.

War seems to be the only situation in which it is somehow morally imperative to only get one side of the story...

How arogant do you have to be to consider yourself to be the arbiter of Truth?

Do you really think that western media are propaganda free?

Do you think that the western propaganda is good and Russian one is bad?

If you're downranking disinformation from Russian side, shouldn't you also downrank western disinformation?

Does your assesment of truthfulness really boil-down to "in-group good / out-group bad"? If yes, why bother reading anything, you already know what your conclusion is going to be.

The very idea of a search engine is to filter a few useful pages out hundreds of thousands of pages. It's impossible to do that without bias and it's bizarre to think Russian disinformation sites could provide useful information. Not even Russians think that. The search engine should give the respective results when the user enters "Russian disinformation sites" or something like that, of course.

On a side note, during the past two weeks Russian disinformation campaigns have become so awfully retarded that it's not even funny to browse them for entertainment anymore. It's just obvious bullshit, changing the tune daily because FSB agents no longer know what to say.

Good. When I search for things on DDG, I expect relevant results. Disinformation (from Russia or elsewhere) is the precise opposite of relevant results, for the same reason as SEO spam pages and malware sites and clickbait articles are the precise opposite of relevant results.

So now the question is whether this will indeed apply to all disinformation or just Russia's.

Perhaps DDG could tell us what their sources of information are, that they are able to discern what is disinformation.

Seems like there would be an opening here for DDG to create a separate section (if they're insistent on this disinformation down-rank path) to publish a clear and falsifiable algo their systems use to determine disinformation and also an option to view those results that are down-ranked as a result of the algo.

Censorship on Google Search, Youtube didn't start with the Russian invasion. It started with the need to counter Trump. Very scary times.

„He who fights too long against dragons becomes a dragon himself; and if you gaze too long into the abyss, the abyss will gaze into you.“ — Friedrich Nietzsche, book Beyond Good and Evil

It started long before Trump. Here is a list of just a few examples:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_Google

Right, but before it was done mostly secretly, with shame. Now censorship is normalized and announced proudly.

I would argue that most of it is still secret, or at least not widely known about. They're only announcing this particular censorship because it falls in line with popular current events

Lot of hot takes and hostility in these comments, which is honestly kinda surprising.

If your reaction to this news is negative, ask yourself, should DuckDuckGo downrank SEO spam? Then ask yourself how disinformation written to "go viral" on social media and in search results is different from SEO spam.

SEO spam is... spam. No one wants spam, and usually has obvious indicators of SEO manipulation.

Q: Who determines what is "Russian disinformation?"

A: Teams of "specialists" funded by the US/UK governments (Bellingcat, Atlantic Council, etc).

The people writing the search algorithms decide, just like they decide what a "good" algorithm is.

I would bet you $50 that DDG was handled/requested a blocklist of domains from a spooky US/UK govt associate and did not unilaterally create it themselves.

Your assertion is not falsifiable, but I would otherwise take the other side of that bet.

Sure it is. We can ask @yegg about their methodology

Its exactly what happened to Qwant so it's not far fetched.

That is most likely what happened and the naivety around it is annoying.

It seems more naive to think search algorithms are ever "unbiased". The whole point is to find something by ranking them and applying a bias.

I kinda doubt the US govt cares about DDG.

Also, the US/UK gov is not an entirely unreasonable starting point for a list. There are also lots of academic researchers, media, etc. Better to apply some standards than none at all. I'm sure whatever list they have is not perfect, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't have one.

... are you saying Russian disinformation does not have obvious indicators of SEO manipulation? That would be a pretty big change for them.

Yes

... Unless your "indicator" is "deviates from the Washington narrative", which is totally ridiculous.

I don't know what you're basing that last sentence on. Disinformation is infamous for leveraging black-hat SEO techniques. CF for example https://policyreview.info/articles/analysis/disinformation-o...

ask yourself why this particular variety of disinformation written to "go viral" on social media and in search results is different from any other. ask yourself whether your own state's government ever engages in similar activity, or whether this is something that only this specific state government in question does. ask yourself why other people making decisions about what kinds of propaganda you do and don't see is good for you and ultimately society as a whole. ask yourself why information flow on the Internet is becoming increasingly restricted and censored, and how we got to the point where Internet users seem to actively demand such restrictions and censorship, when it most certainly wasn't this way in the past.

Did DDG say they're upranking "good" propaganda and downranking "bad" propaganda? What I understood from the tweets is that DDG is downranking propaganda. Russia happens to produce a lot of it, so they'd be more impacted.

No, what they said is that they're downranking "sites associated with Russian disinformation", not "propaganda." If what you understood is different than that, it's different that what the tweet directly says.

Source reputation is an important heuristic for determining whether a given piece is content is likely to be spam. If a web property is demonstrated to be routinely publishing falsehoods to sway public opinion, you don't think that should factor into a site's reputation score?

what is and is not propaganda is subjective. something your state government tells you that you take for granted to be true may in fact be propaganda. but in the absence of a Universal Propaganda Detection Algorithm, whether or not something is propaganda is up to personal interpretation.

We're arguing the same point, I think. The GP was arguing against a straw man that only one kind of spam should be downranked.

When you downgrade one site another site is upranked.

If you have a basic result

1. Good 2. Bad 3. Good

And downrank the propaganda, the #3 result will now be #2. This is up ranking the good by default.

Exactly. Every search algorithm requires making judgements about how and what to rank. Explicitly marking sites as "disinformation"/"spam"/"seo" is exactly a part of building a good global web search.

Thank you! This really needed to be said. This is about political SEO Spam nothing else.

This would not be a problem if all SEO spam was treated the same. But in this case DDG would only consider disinformation coming from one side as "SEO spam" thus making a political stance and not a search quality stance, which would consider all disinformation equally (leaving aside the question how would DDG even be able to tell what is disinformation in the first place)

Info from both sides are supposed to go viral. Why does that part matter?

What matters is that SEO spamming techniques are used to force it to go viral. It's not about sides, though one side in this conflict uses spam much more than the other.

Russian disinformation... please define disinformation. Disinformation: Anything against USA regime?

I support this as an avid DDG user. Russian disinformation is a new kind of warfare that we've not inoculated ourselves against yet. This is a step in that direction. “in order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must be intolerant of intolerance.”

If you're intolerant you are not tolerant. If you only tolerate what you approve of, you're not tolerate at all.

The definition of tolerating includes viewpoints that are not your own.

Otherwise everyone in existence would be tolerant

You present tolerance as binary: you are tolerant or you are intolerant. There are degrees of tolerance. If you wish to foster a more tolerant society, you can refuse to tolerate the least tolerant people and thereby make the net level of tolerance in the society higher. Basically, you ban the bigots. Is this bigotry against bigots? No, actually, because bigotry is holding an unjustified negative opinion against someone and this would be a justified opinion, but setting that aside, it would result in less bigotry.

And tolerating people when they behave and not tolerating them otherwise is different from not tolerating people because of innocuous characteristics which are outside their control, like their skin color, their gender, or their place of birth. You can choose not to abuse the disabled and thereby make yourself less bigoted. You can't choose not to be disabled.

But in the eyes of the bigot their bigotry is totally justified.

So it all boils down to "but I am right, trust me, my bigotry is totally justified"

But yes, you're right with your assessment, that I view being tolerant as an absolute state.

From my point of view being "a little" tolerant or "being 98% tolerant" is the same as not being tolerant at all.

Being tolerant doesn't mean that I won't defend my values or stand in between a bully (or worse) and their victim.

It just means, that I can totally bear it to live next door to Nazis (which sadly in my country isn't too uncommon) without actively attacking them.

That's not really the case.

Imagine two societies that have ten kinds of ideologies in them. In each society, one ideology rules.

One society will never give people like Lenin the time of day, but people of most other creeds are free to speak and act how they wish to.

In another, only people like Lenin will be approved, and a couple others tolerated grudgingly.

The first is easily much more free than the second, and I don't think you'd find a 100% free society pretty much anywhere, because even though the Paradox of Tolerance is endlessly abused, actually letting Lenin go about being Lenin is a really bad idea.

The issue is not necessarily in the argument, it's that it's wielded primarily by wokelets and other censorship-happy people in the present day, and their intolerance is not defined and narrow at all: their tolerance chart looks a lot more like Lenin's one than the anti-Lenin society's. When these people speak of tolerance, they speak of adherence with their own program since their own program is ostensibly a "tolerant" one.

The woke are, of course, tolerant the same way North Korea is democratic and the Berlin Wall was an "anti-Fascist protection rampart". "Bigot" just means "not on board with the ideological program" and is pretty expansive in definition. Lenin.

> So it all boils down to "but I am right, trust me, my bigotry is totally justified"

Are you suggesting here that bigotry against Nazis is not justified? Or if not then what argument are you making? What do you hope to achieve with it? Nazis will always argue freedom of expression and make the argument you are making while it benefits them. They were democratically elected after all. But this doesn't mean they actually believe them. It's going to get thrown out the window the moment they are put in a position of power. Good on you for supporting that I guess?

> Are you suggesting here that bigotry against Nazis is not justified?

What exactly do you expect me to answer here?

If I say no, I created kind of an ex falso quodlibet situation, a contradiction (from some points of view)

If I say yes, I am labeled as a Nazi, because what else could I be?

This technique didn't work in ancient Rome, it doesn't now.

I never was a Nazi, nor will I ever be one. I can sleep well saying that not once in my life have I felt superior to anyone because my skin color is white or because I am male. The thought simply never occurred to me (apart from analyzing the existence of such thoughts in others)

But, yes, I want to reach out to Nazis, because the majority of them are "lost souls" (no, I am not religious by any means) and not the hardcore people that really know what they are doing.

> Good on you for supporting that I guess?

See, ad hominems also don't work on me. (They may work on bystanders though)

I don’t see how that quote applies at all.

Intolerance is something like Nazism. That’s an ideology, not information/disinformation. You can’t disprove an ideology.

Take Russia’s falsehood that the war is a “special military operation”. This is a statement which is neither tolerant nor intolerant. We can clearly see that Russia has launched a full-scale operation against Ukraine, that it is unprovoked, and thus that it is illegal. So we can conclude that “special military operation” is disinformation; just a euphemism for a crime.

A tolerant society can deal with falsehoods just fine.

DDG is done for me.

A good move.

Way too many people think unbiased means unfiltered. If outright propaganda overwhelms good information, that is bias. It's a relative of the paradox of tolerance: if you don't clean the garbage out, everyone else will leave.

This is just outrageous. Disinformation is an undefined word.

History is written by the winner. So even historical "facts"... Are not facts.

I am being more and more skeptical about the internet as a whole.

The internet is owned by a couple of actors... Too sad!

Right now Russia is an enemy to any normal person/company who opposes the genocidal war Russia is waging in Ukraine. It is perfectly fine to strike at your enemy's propaganda.

I've said it once and I've said it again - I don't need tech companies to tell me what is and isn't disinformation.

terrible move, duck duck go.

And so we come back to the eternal question: who decides between information/disinformation and what are their biases?

Seems like a bad move, DDG is only used by terminally tech-brained libertarians.

What if my intend was to find the Russian misinformation?

"I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that."

Can we also start down-ranking Fox News, Breitbart and other disinformation sites just in time for the 2022/2024 elections?

Asking for a friend.

I’m OK with this.

Given that it was a KGB policy to mess with the truth[1] I think it’s fine to try to inoculate yourself from it.

1. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IQPsKvG6WMI

> "...Like so many others I am sickened by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the gigantic humanitarian crisis it continues to create. #StandWithUkraine"

Thanks Gabriel, Thanks DDG for the action beyond just words!

Every bit of support to Ukraine now is adding up and should show the unity against the subversion, hell, the perversion! of human values, freedoms, and history.

Plurality of opinions, freedom of speech, access to multitude of sources, and free flow of information are what the current Russian state has long considered as the West's weak points, prone to the "active measures". At present it's clear that the Russian state's disdain for these values has gone beyond mere manipulation and distortion.

Now this is an outright extension of Russia's war arsenal.

Sowing distrust and confusion is their way to try to distract and indeed disable the critical minds of anyone who's touched by the barbaric consequences of the Russian state's ongoing invasion of Ukraine.

In this case I consider the down-ranking not as a censure, but rather as an active call for using oneself's critical thinking, beyond the Russian state's manufactured justifications and "truths of the day".

Discussion and personal reflections about this war and the global crisis it has precipitated is the very least anyone can presently do. Taking a practical standing beyond just words and showing solidarity and support to Ukraine in this unfair and mindless war started against it requires integrity and courage. Thank you!

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