What happened?
Can you provide a citation for this?
At DuckDuckGo, we've been rolling out search updates that down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation.
https://twitter.com/yegg/status/1501716484761997318
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> In addition to down-ranking sites associated with disinformation, we also often place news modules and information boxes at the top of DuckDuckGo search results (where they are seen and clicked the most) to highlight quality information for rapidly unfolding topics.
https://twitter.com/yegg/status/1501717193855283201
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It should be obvious why this is problematic ...
Or search google yourself to get a broader picture.
"At DuckDuckGo, we've been rolling out search updates that down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation.": [1]
At this point, DDG is a front for Microsoft using 'privacy' buzzwords. Might as well use Brave Search then.
[0] https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so...
[1] https://twitter.com/yegg/status/1501716484761997318
[2] https://www.vox.com/recode/22981115/duckduckgo-free-speech-p...
[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/duckduckgo/comments/hx5dn5/proof_du...
This is the gist of what everyone is upset about, of those who are upset. The entire point of DDG was that the search results were never to be tampered with for personalization reasons, censoring results due to political reasons seems to be a slippery slope.
Also, search engines have _as their sole purpose_ sorting their list of links by some measure of quality. Removing useless nonsense is what we go there for.
I don't see how capturing personal information from users for any reason has anything whatsoever to do with omitting perceived misinformation from all users across the board. One can agree or disagree with the decision, but they are two entirely different issues in entirely different areas, and one is in no way a "slippery slope" toward the other.