Comment by sshine | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sshine | Hacker News Reader

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DuckDuckGo censored Russian news sites during the invasion of Ukraine. I can’t say I experienced the censorship, or that I’ve confirmed if Russian websites are still censored, but this is the reason I stopped using DuckDuckGo. Which was quite disappointing, because they had very fast, not annoying search results. But I just can’t use fast and good looking, if I can’t modulate my search filters (have filters that are always on regardless of what I prompt for).

https://slate.com/technology/2022/03/duckduckgo-russian-disi...

> Last week, Gabriel Weinberg announced that his company would be combating Russian disinformation. “Like so many others I am sickened by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the gigantic humanitarian crisis it continues to create,” he wrote on Twitter. “At DuckDuckGo, we’ve been rolling out search updates that down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation.” Although the move was more or less in line with how other major online platforms have been responding to the Russian invasion, pushback from DuckDuckGo’s user base has been pronounced. More than 30,000 users on Twitter have responded to Weinberg’s post with largely negative comments about the decision, accusing the company of engaging in censorship and injecting bias into search results. Breitbart ran a piece attacking DuckDuckGo as “Diet Google,” and high-profile libertarian YouTubers have also told their followers to stop using it.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36143328.

I had poor word choice that got grossly misinterpreted, so I subsequently wrote the help article referenced above (https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/ne...) to give clarity: "we don’t evaluate or otherwise take into account any potential political bias or leanings of websites in our search result rankings."

In reality we never censored anything, nor do we have a disinformation/"truth" detector, nor did we go looking for any Russian narrative (or any other narrative for that matter). Instead, we just have essentially a spam detector that had detected some spam from Russian state sites. That's it.

I am going to call out this lie every time you post it: spam is not a synonym for misinformation. This was a disingenuous lie seven months ago when you copy pasted this response and it is no less different today.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33250463

Relevance and truth are two different things. It is not your job to be making calls on the second one, and I find your willful conflation of these concepts, and continuing attempts to deflect from the fact that you have done so to be a bit gross.

I never said they are synonyms. What I am saying is we are acting on spam and not misinformation. We do not have a misinformation/disinformation/truth/lie detector or whatever you want to call it. We do not evaluate individual stories or narratives for truth and never have. We are not an "arbiter of truth" in any way. We did not go looking for anything Russian or for any other country in particular. We did not go looking for any narrative at all. And highest level as I quoted from the News Rankings page, "we don’t evaluate or otherwise take into account any potential political bias or leanings of websites in our search result rankings."

We do not have a misinformation/disinformation/truth/lie detector or whatever you want to call it. We do not evaluate individual stories or narratives for truth and never have.

No, going by your own website, you outsource that judgment call to an unnamed and unaccountable list of third parties that apply unnamed and unauditable "objective" "journalistic standards" (which are not things that exist), which will then result in entire sites showing lower in the rankings an unspecified amount with no notification to the user that you have done this.

If this was actually about spam, there would be no need to bring "journalistic standards" into the equation. Spam is spam regardless of who it comes from. There would be no need to be so coy about all of this.

It is about spam. There are actually many flavors of spam and they each need their own spam detector. For example parked domain spam vs. adult content spam vs. copycat site spam vs. content-farm spam vs. news spam.

This is about news spam. The referenced organizations are evaluating a supposed news site's process on how they go about making news ("journalistic standards") and in particular what we care about is whether there really is any process/standard at all. That is, we're only looking for the very few sites that everyone agrees has no news process and is just a site purporting to be a news site but isn't in reality. From the page: "a well-documented history of a site’s extremely low journalistic standards, correlated with: routinely using spam or clickbait to artificially inflate traffic, consistently publishing stories without citing sources, censoring stories due to operating with very limited press freedom, and misleading readers about who owns, funds, and authors stories for the site." Spamming search engines to game rankings is the primary criteria here.

However, we note that "Many sites may occasionally do one or more of these things, but we take action very rarely, only in the most extreme cases." We're talking tiny amounts of domains here because "we must see at least three of these organizations independently assess a site as having extremely low journalistic standards and also see that none of these organizations have assessed the same site as having even somewhat robust journalistic standards." That means if the site has any pulse of a real news site then it doesn't get counted as spam.

And it also says for these spam sites: "We trust that users can find the right information for themselves, so even in these rare cases we do not remove these sites from our search results page. Additionally, impacted sites are not moved so far down in the results that they are effectively removed."

If this is truly a site by site blacklist, and it is truly this small, and truly limited to only the most extreme cases, you realize that even the slightest crumb of transparency would invalidate most of the complaints, right? This is why you are getting dragged repeatedly, all of the possible reasons for being this cagey about this reflect terribly on DDG. Your FAQ page is loaded with what Wikipedia would call "weasel words".

- Why can you not publish who these organizations are and what the "objective" standards they all use are?

- Why can you not notify users when they have entered a query that has results subjected to this rank modification? (And/or give them the ability to reverse it?)

- Why can you not just publish the naughty list?

- Why can you not publish anything objectively verifiable about this entire process?

That page is being transparent about how exactly it works, which is why I wrote it. I'm sorry you don't like the words I chose, but they were not chosen to "weasel" out of anything, but to be accurate, which is why I keep quoting them. We can consider more transparency for sure, and duly noted.

> we’ve been rolling out search updates that down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation

> In reality we never censored anything, nor do we have a disinformation/"truth" detector

Sorry, those are conflicting statements.

I cannot determine which of the two statements are true.

I assume filtering search spam is complicated. I can believe the narrative where Russian disinformation actually resulted in what you call more "news spam" (i.e. news sites that have recently gamed their own search rank).

But it genuinely felt like you wanted to affect the war, and your leverage was "suppress Russian lies", which incidentally suppresses everyone's perception of what's going on. Not even Switzerland was neutral in the invasion of Ukraine, so I understand the incentives.

But you can't both support politically motivated filtering and claim to be neutral.

Let's say the real purpose was always to reduce "news spam", and Russia increased their news spam when invading Ukraine. Let's say both DuckDuckGo's search quality and trustworthiness depends on being mostly neutral. Given your feedback in this thread, I'll continue to recommend DuckDuckGo to friends. And I'll continue to use Kagi myself for now. :-)

> Let's say the real purpose was always to reduce "news spam", and Russia increased their news spam when invading Ukraine.

Yes, that is correct. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36145183

There is a difference between my personal political opinion and the fact that DuckDuckGo itself acts non-politically, which is what actually happened.

High profile libertarian youtubers and Breitbart readers. Got it.

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