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Comment by Alupis | Hacker News Reader

Dear DuckDuckGo,

Please stop censoring search results, no matter how morally/politically opposed to them the organization may be. Privacy + Censorship is not a good mix.

The truth needs no defense.

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We are not (and never were) censoring results. I realize I caused the misunderstanding due to own my unfortunate phrasing in a tweet, and since then, how our news results rankings work has been highly misinterpreted.

We (DuckDuckGo) subsequently made a help page to explain it in detail: https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/ne.... Tl;dr: we don’t censor, we don’t move things so far down that they are effectively censored, we don't evaluate individual stories or narratives for "truth", and we don’t rank based on any political agenda or opinions. This is just a summary though so would read the help page for details.

I also put out a clarification thread about various misconceptions that included this topic amongst others (like the fact that no, we’re not owned by Google), but the help page referenced above is the best and most thorough explanation of our news rankings. https://twitter.com/yegg/status/1515635886855233537

I'm sorry, but this does not seem to counter your initial tweet at all. Your first tweet said, and I quote, "At DuckDuckGo, we've been rolling out search updates that down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation."

This is censorship, since DDG is now deciding what is considered "Disinformation".

Your clarification thread does not state DDG is not down-ranking these sites based on what DDG feels is "disinformation". It merely asserts DDG is not purging results - these are two very different things.

Just to be clear, I too support Ukraine, and am aghast at the deliberately misleading information ("disinformation") coming out of the Russian War Machine. However, as I previously wrote, the truth needs no defense. Hiding away things we don't like doesn't make them go away, it just makes them go underground. We need this information freely available so it can be discussed and disproven out in the open.

If users wanted curated search results, they might as well use Google or Bing...

Lastly, to repeat, Privacy + Censorship (of any kind) do not go together. This was quite a large misstep for DDG, and has burned a lot of trust.

Not sure if you read the whole thread as it says explicitly "We are not ranking based on any political agenda or my (or anyone else's) personal political opinions. We are also not assessing any individual news stories."

That said, the help page I referenced is the most detailed explanation of how our news rankings work: https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/ne....

To be clear, that means we do not have a definition of "disinformation". I'm to blame for tweeting something that was highly ambiguous but we were never actually doing what we've been accused of doing.

Accused is a strong word. It's more like "what we accidentally claimed to be doing".

It's a very tough situation, needing to assure people that you honestly aren't doing what you claimed and just misspoke.

They rank based on relevancy. Domains that are found misleading readers often are less relevant than domains that are misleading readers less often. That's it. All search engines have to make these calls all the time, and I see no viable alternative approach that would be better. There is no 'natural' ordering of the web...it's all judgment. If you think DDG's results are less relevant than those you get elsewhere, use the better engine!

I think you lost all credibility when you made that tweet. If you want to regain it, you should be completely transparent about which sites you have taken any specific ranking action regarding, and why. This should be relatively easy to do, as you say you take action very rarely.

@yegg Even if you don't agree with one side, you can't consider the side to be "spam", "disinformation" or "propaganda" and hope people will just be OK with that. What is spam to you, is useful information for somebody else, some people love what Tucker Carlson have to say, others prefer Brian Stelter. That's why freedom of speech exists[1]. I think the right approach to down ranking is having a banner with a link with undeniable proof of what the article says is wrong, which is very hard to do, I get it. Otherwise, is preferential down ranking, and whatever you argue on Twitter won't change the minds of people. I too have been using DDG from the beginning, and I'm grateful more private alternative to Google exists, I just hate censoring as much as privacy violating businesses.

1- https://www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/commentary/ct-neo-naz...

I think you may have misinterpreted how this works. We do not do any page or story or narrative level assessment or fact checking at all, or any fact checking for that matter.

[Original comment removed by author 'cuz it's now moot]

Edit: My bad, I missed a legit link in parent comment. That said, that link should have been front & center. (Edit 2: it now is. Good on you!)

The help page referenced is only about this topic and provides the most thorough and up to date explanation of how our news rankings work: https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/ne...

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