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Comment by paldepind2 | Hacker News Reader

Calling what DDG did "selective censorship" is a very unfair description. Essentially a search engine is about sorting search results and any search engine must do that based on some idea about what information is good and what is bad. DDG has been doing that since day one. In fact, the primary reason DDG was created was because its creator thought they could improve search results by getting rid of things that showed up in Google that they thought where bad (the privacy selling point came later)[1]. You may disagree with some of these choices (which is fair) but calling them "censorship" is just using bad sounding words that don't really apply.

1: Source, Gabriel Weinberg's book Traction.

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I fail to see how this could be called anything else without resorting to newspeak. It's politically motivated downranking of sources that the operators of DDG are in ideological disagreement with. It's a way of exerting narrative control over public perceptions.

Downranking sites that disrespect user privacy using trackers and similar is different, because it is not ideologically motivated. I guess you could call it censorship, but no-one except the site owners are going to take issue with it.

A simple way to tell if something is political censorship is to ask: who will take issue with the absence of this piece of information that is being removed or hidden? If the answer contains groups of people that aren't just corporations, I think it's pretty clear what is going on.

And I guess I have to repeat myself here: no, I don't personally belong to such a group in this context. I just happen to not want anyone telling me what I'm supposed to believe, even if I'm "on their side".

As they said, you still have to sort top to bottom the results consistently. SEO "hacking" is a big problem, allowing sites to put themselves at the top even though they're not relevant to the search or are not the most common source of information that real users click on. You have to take action against those abuses by downranking. It just so happens that a big government, Russia, was caught doing this.

Just because it may be "political" doesn't give it special protection.

The core feature of their product is "we will discard all the data on the internet except 10 links". They already "censor" nearly everything.

It is completely reasonable to question their algorithms and processes. I don't see why Russian disinformation needs to be singled out given what is allowed in the corporate press every time the US starts a fight somewhere (can they please downrank all sociopath war mongers?). But while it may be political activism it isn't censorship. If you use DDG you ask for them to make judgement calls.

Folks throw that word around so much that it's become neutral.

The people that use DDG overwhelmingly are not using it as a search engine to find Russian disinformation. This is literally a case of a business announcing that it's working to do its stated business activity, which is to provide relevant search results.

What he actually said: "At DuckDuckGo, we've been rolling out search updates that down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation."

You may note what Microsoft had stated earlier [0] "We are removing RT news apps from our Windows app store and further de-ranking these sites’ search results on Bing so that it will only return RT and Sputnik links when a user clearly intends to navigate to those pages."

[0] https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2022/02/28/ukraine...

I'm just waiting for the day my flashlight starts deciding what to shine a light on based on my perceived intentions

I guess that will be the day that you buy a flashlight intended to rank and only light up the top 10 / 20 most relevant things?

It's like complaining about water making you wet.

Relevant to the flashlight you mean?

down ranking is basically throwing the results down the later pages which is the same as removing results, just doing it in a sneaky way.

and rating stuff as disinformation is censorship. i want my search engine to be like the internet, i.e. a conduit for bits, not a self righteous mind that controls what goes thru.

But then you open yourself up entirely to being manipulated by the website owners. The Russian government has enough resources to artificially push their SEO way higher than it should be, and it's objectively lower quality information.

There isn't really a neutral option (no "conduit for bits") – you either let low quality, high resource sites flood your search results, or you try to filter for quality. Here, that choice is also aligned with a political choice.

> The Russian government has enough resources to artificially push their SEO way higher than it should be,

country with low tier GDP has supposedly more resources to move SEO than the first or second tech powerhouse in the world? Hum. I smell bullshit here.

If I take your argument as valid I should worry about Spain next.

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