4 ms·
Lot of hot takes and hostility in these comments, which is honestly kinda surprising. If your reaction to this news is negative, ask yourself, should DuckDuckG
by giaour 5y ago
Lot of hot takes and hostility in these comments, which is honestly kinda surprising.
If your reaction to this news is negative, ask yourself, should DuckDuckGo downrank SEO spam? Then ask yourself how disinformation written to "go viral" on social media and in search results is different from SEO spam.
- pphysch 5y agoSEO spam is... spam. No one wants spam, and usually has obvious indicators of SEO manipulation. Q: Who determines what is "Russian disinformation?" A: Teams of "specialists" funded by the US/UK governments (Bellingcat, Atlantic Council, etc).
- gibrown 5y agoThe people writing the search algorithms decide, just like they decide what a "good" algorithm is.
- pphysch 5y agoI would bet you $50 that DDG was handled/requested a blocklist of domains from a spooky US/UK govt associate and did not unilaterally create it themselves.
- giaour 5y agoYour assertion is not falsifiable, but I would otherwise take the other side of that bet.
- pphysch 5y agoSure it is. We can ask @yegg about their methodology
- mardifoufs 5y agoIts exactly what happened to Qwant so it's not far fetched.
- bobobob420 5y agoThat is most likely what happened and the naivety around it is annoying.
- gibrown 5y agoIt seems more naive to think search algorithms are ever "unbiased". The whole point is to find something by ranking them and applying a bias.
- gibrown 5y agoI kinda doubt the US govt cares about DDG. Also, the US/UK gov is not an entirely unreasonable starting point for a list. There are also lots of academic researchers, media, etc. Better to apply some standards than none at all. I'm sure whatever list they have is not perfect, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't have one.
- giaour 5y ago... are you saying Russian disinformation does not have obvious indicators of SEO manipulation? That would be a pretty big change for them.
- pphysch 5y agoYes ... Unless your "indicator" is "deviates from the Washington narrative", which is totally ridiculous.
- giaour 5y agoI don't know what you're basing that last sentence on. Disinformation is infamous for leveraging black-hat SEO techniques. CF for example https://policyreview.info/articles/analysis/disinformation-optimised-gaming-search-engine-algorithms-amplify-junk-news https://policyreview.info/articles/analysis/disinformation-o...
- adamrezich 5y agoask yourself why this particular variety of disinformation written to "go viral" on social media and in search results is different from any other. ask yourself whether your own state's government ever engages in similar activity, or whether this is something that only this specific state government in question does. ask yourself why other people making decisions about what kinds of propaganda you do and don't see is good for you and ultimately society as a whole. ask yourself why information flow on the Internet is becoming increasingly restricted and censored, and how we got to the point where Internet users seem to actively demand such restrictions and censorship, when it most certainly wasn't this way in the past.
- giaour 5y agoDid DDG say they're upranking "good" propaganda and downranking "bad" propaganda? What I understood from the tweets is that DDG is downranking propaganda. Russia happens to produce a lot of it, so they'd be more impacted.
- pessimizer 5y agoNo, what they said is that they're downranking "sites associated with Russian disinformation", not "propaganda." If what you understood is different than that, it's different that what the tweet directly says.
- giaour 5y agoSource reputation is an important heuristic for determining whether a given piece is content is likely to be spam. If a web property is demonstrated to be routinely publishing falsehoods to sway public opinion, you don't think that should factor into a site's reputation score?
- adamrezich 5y agowhat is and is not propaganda is subjective. something your state government tells you that you take for granted to be true may in fact be propaganda. but in the absence of a Universal Propaganda Detection Algorithm, whether or not something is propaganda is up to personal interpretation.
- gibrown 5y agoExactly. Every search algorithm requires making judgements about how and what to rank. Explicitly marking sites as "disinformation"/"spam"/"seo" is exactly a part of building a good global web search.
- cycomanic 5y agoThank you! This really needed to be said. This is about political SEO Spam nothing else.
- freediver 5y agoThis would not be a problem if all SEO spam was treated the same. But in this case DDG would only consider disinformation coming from one side as "SEO spam" thus making a political stance and not a search quality stance, which would consider all disinformation equally (leaving aside the question how would DDG even be able to tell what is disinformation in the first place)
- avgcorrection 5y agoInfo from both sides are supposed to go viral. Why does that part matter?
- giaour 5y agoWhat matters is that SEO spamming techniques are used to force it to go viral. It's not about sides, though one side in this conflict uses spam much more than the other.