I realized I previously explained how our news rankings work very poorly on Twitter that got grossly misinterpreted, so I subsequently put out a clarification in this help page with a much clearer (and detailed) explanation of how our news rankings actually work: https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/news-ra...
From that page: "When we apply our own ranking signals we do so in a strictly non-political manner, meaning we don’t evaluate or otherwise take into account any potential political bias or leanings of websites in our search result rankings." That is, we did not/do not 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.