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Hrm. I always wonder in these situations, what about the slippery slope in the opposite direction? "Political bias" is not a well-defined term; different people

Hrm. I always wonder in these situations, what about the slippery slope in the opposite direction? "Political bias" is not a well-defined term; different people have different opinions about what topics are political and about what counts as bias. So let's say that DuckDuckGo commits to not doing any filtering or sorting based on a nebulous term like "politics". If you choose to go down that path - what concepts are political and who is supposed to be the judge of that? It seems to me that in order to have any web search engine of any real use, we necessarily have to accept that we are on some level ranking facts based on how relevant they are to queries, and we have to accept that we're going to try and strike a balance between neutrality and usefulness, and that different people/engines will have different ideas about what that balance is. Of course it would be better if consumers had more choices about different search engines to use in situations where they feel the rankings are bad, but... is it necessarily DuckDuckGo's fault that there aren't more search engines?

freediver 5y ago
A search engine should have ranking factors that tie to the end goal of providing the most relevant results to their users. However this decision is about unilaterally down-ranking a subset of results because of the political view expressed on them (if it was about misinformation than surely they would want to down-rank all misinformation equally - if they had capability to do so in the first place). This is at the same level of absurdity from a search engine user perspective as would downranking sites because their tld is .net or because they are in italian language.
- danShumway 5y ago
  > if it was about misinformation than surely they would want to down-rank all misinformation equally - if they had capability to do so in the first place They don't have that capability. DuckDuckGo also doesn't have the capability to surface only correct JS code when I search for a programming concept. There isn't a binary here, all manual upranking and downranking of any content is always playing whack-a-mole, none of it is systemic or equally applied -- that's why it's manual and not automatic. DuckDuckGo tries to strike a balance between manually downranking misinformation that is obviously wrong, while being careful about downranking in less clear-cut situations. It is justifiable to critique them in whether or not they've done a good job of that, and it is definitely justifiable to ask about why they don't apply the same standards to certain other propaganda sources. But that's not how I originally read your comment: "The problem discussed here is not of search quality bias nature, but of political bias nature which should not have a place in a general web search engine." There's a big difference between saying that a specific search engine isn't doing a good job of stamping out all misinformation, or that it's being very selective about which misinformation it cares about, and saying that political content should be immune from ranking systems. ---- > This is at the same level of absurdity from a search engine user perspective as would downranking sites because their tld is .net or because they are in italian language. You know that most search engines downrank non-English-language sources for you if you're located in America, right? They try to return results in languages that you're likely to be able to read. And search engines don't base rankings off of tlds because that would be trivial for adversaries to take advantage of by switching to upranked tlds. It's not at all comparable to deciding to downrank a news source.
  - freediver 5y ago
    > It is justifiable to critique them in whether or not they've done a good job of that, If the announcement said "all disinformation about Russian-Ukraine conflict" it would grant benefit of a doubt about their execution as you point out. But it says "Russian disinformation" thus they are making it about politics (something a search engine should not be doing), not fighting disinformation (something a search engine should be doing), so we are justified to critique them on that basis. > You know that most search engines downrank non-English-language sources for you if you're located in America, right? They try to return results in languages that you're likely to be able to read. Correct. Because they can rightfully infer that the user is searching in english and likely wants results in english. However in this case, they are inferring a certain political view of the conflict, regardless of what your intent is (what if you are a Russian or Chinese DDG user, or simply someone who is agnostic and wants to read what all sides have to say to form a world view?). No basis for inference can be established here. The only way this could work is by having a switch in the interface to turn such results off, so the user can opt in into it if they prefer to.
    - danShumway 5y ago
      > But it says "Russian disinformation" thus they are making it about politics I don't follow. What specifically do you mean when you say the word "politics"? Do you mean that targeting a specific source of misinformation is political? That's literally all manual interventions, all of them target specific sources. > However in this case, they are inferring a certain political view of the conflict, regardless of what your intent is Well, or they're inferring that the information is factually wrong. Again, just very confused at what you mean by political here. When DuckDuckGo uses the word misinformation, what it means by that word is that DuckDuckGo thinks the information is factually incorrect, regardless of whether you are Russian or Chinese or American. If the DOJ comes out against encryption and says that it has a special chip that's safe enough for everyone, and then a researcher says, "no, I have broken the chip" -- is that a political disagreement? If I block the DOJ source am I making a political statement, or am I saying that the DOJ's assertion in this case is factually wrong? Of course, sorting facts often has political implications, and it is fair to ask about what the political implications and viewpoints are that DuckDuckGo has, and whether it has biases that prevent it from reacting as strongly to, just as an example, US propaganda about refugees or armed conflicts that it has initiated. However, once again, asking critical questions about bias is not the same thing as saying that there is a nebulous category called "politics" where a private company who's job it is to sort information should never sort information. > No basis for inference can be established here. The only way this could work is by having a switch in the interface to turn such results off, so the user can opt in into it if they prefer to. It's hard to argue about this because on one hand, having more user controls around search would genuinely be good. However, this is not really how search works right now outside of rare situations like safe-search and location, and to argue that DuckDuckGo shouldn't be making any editorial decisions about political topics until full user-transparent customization of search algorithms exist -- it's effectively the same thing as arguing that no editorial decisions should be made right now. To me, this just kind of circles back around to what I was originally saying. Are you upset about a result-sorting business doing its job and sorting results, or are you upset with this very specific decision, or... is it possible you're just upset that we don't have a more competitive market for search engines?
CactusOnFire 5y ago
You're right. Fundamentally, there is no unbiased search engine. Ranking results by definition innately creates a bias. (To be a pedant on my own post: I guess you could do a search engine that collates all search results relating to a keyword and then just shows you a random one first, but I doubt that's what the people want).
- freediver 5y ago
  The source and purpose of the bias matters for a search engine. One thing to be biased against duplicate content and stuffed keywords, another thing is to have bias against blue widgets because the CEO of the company does not like blue widgets.
  - paulmd 5y ago
    flat-earthers would probably also feel they're being unfairly downranked because "the CEO does not like flat-earthers", however. Factual untruth is a good reason for a result to be considered low-relevance to a tangentially related search.
    - freediver 5y ago
      The correct analogy in this case would be if there were both 'square earthers' and 'flat earthers' and DDG decides to penalize only results from 'flat earthers'. Both sides produce factual untruth but only one gets penalized.
      - danShumway 5y ago
        I do want to interject here: there is propaganda coming out of all sides during this war, that is unequivocally true. However, it is also unequivocally true that some of the issues/narratives here are not both-sides-are-equally-wrong issues. Russia didn't invade Ukraine to get rid of nazi influence, for example. This is not a territory dispute, it's an unjustified invasion. I want to be careful while we're talking about misinformation to be clear that there is a difference between wartime propaganda (which is still misinformation) and narratives about why Russia invaded in the first place -- the second category is not a debate where every side is equally guilty of misinformation, Russia is a clear aggressor in this conflict. That being said, of course Russia and Ukraine are both engaged in propaganda around the current status of their troops, how the war is going, etc...

freediver 5y ago

A search engine should have ranking factors that tie to the end goal of providing the most relevant results to their users. However this decision is about unilaterally down-ranking a subset of results because of the political view expressed on them (if it was about misinformation than surely they would want to down-rank all misinformation equally - if they had capability to do so in the first place). This is at the same level of absurdity from a search engine user perspective as would downranking sites because their tld is .net or because they are in italian language.

danShumway 5y ago
> if it was about misinformation than surely they would want to down-rank all misinformation equally - if they had capability to do so in the first place They don't have that capability. DuckDuckGo also doesn't have the capability to surface only correct JS code when I search for a programming concept. There isn't a binary here, all manual upranking and downranking of any content is always playing whack-a-mole, none of it is systemic or equally applied -- that's why it's manual and not automatic. DuckDuckGo tries to strike a balance between manually downranking misinformation that is obviously wrong, while being careful about downranking in less clear-cut situations. It is justifiable to critique them in whether or not they've done a good job of that, and it is definitely justifiable to ask about why they don't apply the same standards to certain other propaganda sources. But that's not how I originally read your comment: "The problem discussed here is not of search quality bias nature, but of political bias nature which should not have a place in a general web search engine." There's a big difference between saying that a specific search engine isn't doing a good job of stamping out all misinformation, or that it's being very selective about which misinformation it cares about, and saying that political content should be immune from ranking systems. ---- > This is at the same level of absurdity from a search engine user perspective as would downranking sites because their tld is .net or because they are in italian language. You know that most search engines downrank non-English-language sources for you if you're located in America, right? They try to return results in languages that you're likely to be able to read. And search engines don't base rankings off of tlds because that would be trivial for adversaries to take advantage of by switching to upranked tlds. It's not at all comparable to deciding to downrank a news source.
- freediver 5y ago
  > It is justifiable to critique them in whether or not they've done a good job of that, If the announcement said "all disinformation about Russian-Ukraine conflict" it would grant benefit of a doubt about their execution as you point out. But it says "Russian disinformation" thus they are making it about politics (something a search engine should not be doing), not fighting disinformation (something a search engine should be doing), so we are justified to critique them on that basis. > You know that most search engines downrank non-English-language sources for you if you're located in America, right? They try to return results in languages that you're likely to be able to read. Correct. Because they can rightfully infer that the user is searching in english and likely wants results in english. However in this case, they are inferring a certain political view of the conflict, regardless of what your intent is (what if you are a Russian or Chinese DDG user, or simply someone who is agnostic and wants to read what all sides have to say to form a world view?). No basis for inference can be established here. The only way this could work is by having a switch in the interface to turn such results off, so the user can opt in into it if they prefer to.
  - danShumway 5y ago
    > But it says "Russian disinformation" thus they are making it about politics I don't follow. What specifically do you mean when you say the word "politics"? Do you mean that targeting a specific source of misinformation is political? That's literally all manual interventions, all of them target specific sources. > However in this case, they are inferring a certain political view of the conflict, regardless of what your intent is Well, or they're inferring that the information is factually wrong. Again, just very confused at what you mean by political here. When DuckDuckGo uses the word misinformation, what it means by that word is that DuckDuckGo thinks the information is factually incorrect, regardless of whether you are Russian or Chinese or American. If the DOJ comes out against encryption and says that it has a special chip that's safe enough for everyone, and then a researcher says, "no, I have broken the chip" -- is that a political disagreement? If I block the DOJ source am I making a political statement, or am I saying that the DOJ's assertion in this case is factually wrong? Of course, sorting facts often has political implications, and it is fair to ask about what the political implications and viewpoints are that DuckDuckGo has, and whether it has biases that prevent it from reacting as strongly to, just as an example, US propaganda about refugees or armed conflicts that it has initiated. However, once again, asking critical questions about bias is not the same thing as saying that there is a nebulous category called "politics" where a private company who's job it is to sort information should never sort information. > No basis for inference can be established here. The only way this could work is by having a switch in the interface to turn such results off, so the user can opt in into it if they prefer to. It's hard to argue about this because on one hand, having more user controls around search would genuinely be good. However, this is not really how search works right now outside of rare situations like safe-search and location, and to argue that DuckDuckGo shouldn't be making any editorial decisions about political topics until full user-transparent customization of search algorithms exist -- it's effectively the same thing as arguing that no editorial decisions should be made right now. To me, this just kind of circles back around to what I was originally saying. Are you upset about a result-sorting business doing its job and sorting results, or are you upset with this very specific decision, or... is it possible you're just upset that we don't have a more competitive market for search engines?

CactusOnFire 5y ago

You're right. Fundamentally, there is no unbiased search engine. Ranking results by definition innately creates a bias. (To be a pedant on my own post: I guess you could do a search engine that collates all search results relating to a keyword and then just shows you a random one first, but I doubt that's what the people want).

freediver 5y ago
The source and purpose of the bias matters for a search engine. One thing to be biased against duplicate content and stuffed keywords, another thing is to have bias against blue widgets because the CEO of the company does not like blue widgets.
- paulmd 5y ago
  flat-earthers would probably also feel they're being unfairly downranked because "the CEO does not like flat-earthers", however. Factual untruth is a good reason for a result to be considered low-relevance to a tangentially related search.
  - freediver 5y ago
    The correct analogy in this case would be if there were both 'square earthers' and 'flat earthers' and DDG decides to penalize only results from 'flat earthers'. Both sides produce factual untruth but only one gets penalized.
    - danShumway 5y ago
      I do want to interject here: there is propaganda coming out of all sides during this war, that is unequivocally true. However, it is also unequivocally true that some of the issues/narratives here are not both-sides-are-equally-wrong issues. Russia didn't invade Ukraine to get rid of nazi influence, for example. This is not a territory dispute, it's an unjustified invasion. I want to be careful while we're talking about misinformation to be clear that there is a difference between wartime propaganda (which is still misinformation) and narratives about why Russia invaded in the first place -- the second category is not a debate where every side is equally guilty of misinformation, Russia is a clear aggressor in this conflict. That being said, of course Russia and Ukraine are both engaged in propaganda around the current status of their troops, how the war is going, etc...