"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.
Search results should return good information that is relevant to your query, and filter out anything that is not that.
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.
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.
Truth gets you about 1% of the way towards returning "good information". What are the ideal search results for "orange"?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Should DDG take into account what is and isn't fact-checked? Absolutely, and if DDG gets better at this, their users will benefit.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Which is spam.
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.
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...
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.
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/
Frankly, I'd be surprised if there weren't implicit biases already there.
But this is something new. Its overt, explicit.
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.
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...
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
WHY ISNT MY RIDICULOUS OPINION BEING PRESENTED AS FACT BY THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA??????????????
You realize how insane your arguments are, right?
*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.
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"?
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.
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
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
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...
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.
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
If you're looking for what specific sites are saying, you can still do that.
>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.
For a long, long, time.
If it means saying that Russia is right, definitely not.
>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...