I want to use a search engine that puts all its effort into down-ranking sites that I'm not searching for
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
The best thing to read about it would be Walter Lippmann in general, but starting with Public Opinion.
People who only want to read their government's approved information should download uBlock Homeland while the rest of us read what we want.
Or anyone who considers them agnostic really, wanting to hear information from all sides before constructing a mental model of the situation.
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.
You could listen to Western sources and understand the Russian perspective much better than the breathless confusion in a lot of media.
Of course they are incompatible to some extent. Otherwise, explicit downranking of Russian sources would be pointless.
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.
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.
"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.
I also said that democracies on their doorstep are a dangerous precedent for the serfs the kleptocrats are presently robbing.
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".
jesus christ. stopped reading here
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.
Now blocked in several countries.
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?
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.
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.
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.
So, basically what is done now by downranking "disinformation", right?
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.
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."
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.
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.
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".