8 ms·

DDG is too busy adopting the censorship policies of Big Tech to innovate against them.

lisasays 3y ago
You mean in not caving to conservative-friendly "free speech" preferences? Its decision to downrank state-sponsored disinformation? One can question the wisdom of these decisions - but ultimately it's a matter of editorial control, not censorship.
- eYrKEC2 3y ago
  I want search, not editorial guidance from a search engine.
  - lisasays 3y ago
    Then use a different search engine. To call what DDG is doing (or what a newspaper does when it chooses not to print your foaming, incoherent editor to the letter -- as is, you know, its right) "censorship" is just silly.
  - arp242 3y ago
    It's a search engine's job to rank results; there is no other way to do it: only one link can be in position #1, only one link can be in position #2, etc. Or in other words: "editorial guidance" is pretty much the entirety of a search engine's job: you give it a large set of documents (the internet), some user input (what you typed in the search box), and it ranks – or "editorializes" – the set of documents to something useful for you. And at the same time you also have to account for SEO haxx0rs and outright malicious actors who will try to phish your CC details. Do you want some crackpot website if you search for "Barrack Obama" which claims that he is literally the anti-Christ to be at #1? Or even on the first page at all? Or rolexxxx.com if you search for "buy rolex"? Or bank-of-amerrrica.ru if you search for "Bank of America"? Probably not. A naïve ranking algorithm will end up with that. There is no perfect way to do this; it's a hard problem. Platitudes like this make it sound easy, but it's not.
    - mardifoufs 3y ago
      There is a massive difference between ranking stuff based on relevance and not getting RT articles when... searching for RT. (They rolled back the block pretty quickly, so they seem to agree with that too) You are basically arguing for a slippery slope argument. Because they already need some editorial control to filter spam and obviously irrelevant material does not mean that every type of filtering/block listing is ok. I personally totally get how it can be offputting to people if a search engine starts hiding websites while openly saying that they do it for a political reason. Downranking would be fine, but blocking a news source (as bad as RT is at being that) that isn't spammy or playing with SEO is just different. Yes, I know, everything is political and all. But that's the point! Blocking RT was obviously more so about politics than filtering fake news or trash results.
      - lisasays 3y ago
        It pretty much was just about fake news and trash results, actually. RT really is pure garbage, by its very intent and purpose. I do agree that blocking RT outright was overreach and somewhat silly. However, I imagine it comes more from a gut feeling of disgust and "this is bullshit" then than some ultraelitist, "gotta protect the unwashed masses from harmful ideas that may bring the global order into question" motive that people in this thread seem to want DDG to have.
        mardifoufs 3y ago
        Yes, but they could've just blacklisted or downranked it based on already existing rules about fake news. But they instead went ahead and basically created a rule for Russian content specifically. I don't even doubt DDGs intentions, but that's the thing... in most cases, people who want to suppress or filter out speech/news/etc usually have good intentions because as you said they genuinely think it is harmful content. That's the whole issue! And it's why it's usually such a thorny debate.
    - baryphonic 3y ago
      All of the examples you mentioned involved irrelevant search results (as in, I have never met a soul who wants spam & scams), whereas GP is implying he wants relevant ones. To flip your example, if I wanted to search for "Barack Obama Anti-Christ," I'd want to get those results back, and not have DDG or whatever other authority decide categorically that I shouldn't see them. "Editorial guidance" is a wide spectrum from favoring what the editor thinks is most relevant for the reader to the editor actively censoring content the reader wants to see for external reasons. To be charitable, I read GP as objecting to the latter and not the former.
  - marginalia_nu 3y ago
    I don't think what you want exists or has ever existed. A search engine that does not exercise judgement about relevance and quality will just return noise.
- poszlem 3y ago
  > but ultimately it's a matter of editorial control, not censorship. So is all censorship. No censor calls censorship "Censorship". An example from my country of birth: Main Office of Control over the Press, Publications and Performances, since 1981 the Main Office of Control over Publications and Performances - the central office of state censorship in the Polish People's Republic. It was a censorship body (analogous institutions were present in all countries of the so-called Eastern Bloc) examining all forms of official information communication from the perspective of their compliance with the current state policy, and prohibiting the dissemination of unwanted information and content by the ruling communist party. The name "The Censors" was only adopted after the collapse of communism. I rub my eyes in amazement every time I read people on HN praising censorship and rejoicing that someone will decide for them what they can read and what they can't. I am not able to understand how foolish one has to be to not realize that eventually the censorship organs will be used against you too. Perhaps you think you will always hold the "correct" beliefs in which case I admire your lack of imagination. I miss "hackers" from the 90s with some actual backbone.
  - boredhedgehog 3y ago
    > No censor calls censorship "Censorship". The Catholic Church does. The office of Censor is still part of the official legislation (Can. 830 CIC).
  - soundnote 3y ago
    The actual grim part: It's not an "eventually". Even if the censorship downranks and removes results I disagree with and makes me feel warm and fuzzy and enjoy that my political enemies are gnashing their teeth, it can very well rob me of information it'd be useful to know. eg. to this day many people live under the impression that Kyle Rittenhouse shot three black people. If asked to estimate how many unarmed blacks get killed by police, Democrat voters give absolutely wild estimates when according to shooting databases the actual number is about 20 a year. According to a poll D voters thought you had a 50% chance of dying if you caught Covid, which is completely nuts even with the earlier, more dangerous strains. Yet these people think they're well informed and follow the Science™.
- elzbardico 3y ago
  You know, if the conservatives ever come back to power, this precedent that we are creating on justifying censorship will bit us hard, and it will hurt as hell.
  - lisasays 3y ago
    Repeating that this is form of censorship doesn't make it so. Ironically, what DDG is doing is exercise of its free speech rights - pure and simple.
    - matheusmoreira 3y ago
      And we are exrcising our freedoms by recognizing it and calling it out as the censorship it is and preferring alternatives.
      - lisasays 3y ago
        You're free as a bird to say or think anything you want. Still, at the end of the day - the word "censorship" has specific meaning, and it just doesn't apply to this situation.
  - waboremo 3y ago
    Conservatives are still the status quo btw
    - elzbardico 3y ago
      It's kind of complicated. The old labels of right and left, conservative vs progressives, and socialist vs capitalists are clearly inadequate nowadays. Class struggle based left has all but disappeared in the West. And whatever your point of view on American involvement in Ukraine, it is clear that at least the mainstream branches of both parties are largely in accord. Trump's belligerence on China (justified or not, I am not discussing this) has not only been embraced by the Democrats and NeverТrumpers on the Republican side, but also has been extended far beyond pure economic war, flirting now with proper kinetic war. Environmental issues, once a solid socialist banner, now have been enthusiastically embraced by Wall Street (I suspect, unfortunately, for not-so-noble reasons beyond banks salivating at the prospect of financing the green transition, and entrepreneurs dreaming about all the opportunities on rebuilding our infrastructure and replacing the entire automobile fleet. Not that is bad in itself, capitalism needs constant growth to be viable, and green rebuilding allows this to happen for a few more decades without utterly destroying our planet). Civil rights also have been solidly co-opted by the oligarchic class. Both for reasons that the moral behavior and values of the elites are fairly advanced and they want to impose their values as the mainstream values down the throats of the more backward working class and because it is useful as it redirects energy from unionization and other forms of class struggle. All of our labels and categories simply don't work to understand this complex scenario.
metalliqaz 3y ago
what do they censor?
- nostromo 3y ago
  After the invasion of Ukraine they announced they would be removing sites "associated with Russian disinformation." They haven't provided a definition of what that includes. Lots of DDG users were upset because this is the type of thing they objected to with Google.
  - soundnote 3y ago
    In DDG's defense, some of the censorship was required by law - we don't know if DDG went further than demanded - and Eich himself will tell you that Brave had to remove some results as well.
    - BrendanEich 3y ago
      No, I never said we removed anything due to some nation state's MiniTrue calling it misinformation or disinformation. All search engines must comply with laws (CSAM, right to be forgotten or whatever it is called now) in various regions. That compliance is not in any way the same category as what DDG boasted in March 2022 that it was doing.
      - soundnote 3y ago
        I didn't try to imply such: Like I said, you had to remove things by law. No? Could've been clearer, I guess.
        BrendanEich 3y ago
        But DDG did not have to virtue-signal as it did in March 2022 due to force of law or even unlawful threats from a nation-state. Categorically different -- there's no comparison.

You mean in not caving to conservative-friendly "free speech" preferences? Its decision to downrank state-sponsored disinformation? One can question the wisdom of these decisions - but ultimately it's a matter of editorial control, not censorship.

eYrKEC2 3y ago
I want search, not editorial guidance from a search engine.
- lisasays 3y ago
  Then use a different search engine. To call what DDG is doing (or what a newspaper does when it chooses not to print your foaming, incoherent editor to the letter -- as is, you know, its right) "censorship" is just silly.
- arp242 3y ago
  It's a search engine's job to rank results; there is no other way to do it: only one link can be in position #1, only one link can be in position #2, etc. Or in other words: "editorial guidance" is pretty much the entirety of a search engine's job: you give it a large set of documents (the internet), some user input (what you typed in the search box), and it ranks – or "editorializes" – the set of documents to something useful for you. And at the same time you also have to account for SEO haxx0rs and outright malicious actors who will try to phish your CC details. Do you want some crackpot website if you search for "Barrack Obama" which claims that he is literally the anti-Christ to be at #1? Or even on the first page at all? Or rolexxxx.com if you search for "buy rolex"? Or bank-of-amerrrica.ru if you search for "Bank of America"? Probably not. A naïve ranking algorithm will end up with that. There is no perfect way to do this; it's a hard problem. Platitudes like this make it sound easy, but it's not.
  - mardifoufs 3y ago
    There is a massive difference between ranking stuff based on relevance and not getting RT articles when... searching for RT. (They rolled back the block pretty quickly, so they seem to agree with that too) You are basically arguing for a slippery slope argument. Because they already need some editorial control to filter spam and obviously irrelevant material does not mean that every type of filtering/block listing is ok. I personally totally get how it can be offputting to people if a search engine starts hiding websites while openly saying that they do it for a political reason. Downranking would be fine, but blocking a news source (as bad as RT is at being that) that isn't spammy or playing with SEO is just different. Yes, I know, everything is political and all. But that's the point! Blocking RT was obviously more so about politics than filtering fake news or trash results.
    - lisasays 3y ago
      It pretty much was just about fake news and trash results, actually. RT really is pure garbage, by its very intent and purpose. I do agree that blocking RT outright was overreach and somewhat silly. However, I imagine it comes more from a gut feeling of disgust and "this is bullshit" then than some ultraelitist, "gotta protect the unwashed masses from harmful ideas that may bring the global order into question" motive that people in this thread seem to want DDG to have.
      - mardifoufs 3y ago
        Yes, but they could've just blacklisted or downranked it based on already existing rules about fake news. But they instead went ahead and basically created a rule for Russian content specifically. I don't even doubt DDGs intentions, but that's the thing... in most cases, people who want to suppress or filter out speech/news/etc usually have good intentions because as you said they genuinely think it is harmful content. That's the whole issue! And it's why it's usually such a thorny debate.
  - baryphonic 3y ago
    All of the examples you mentioned involved irrelevant search results (as in, I have never met a soul who wants spam & scams), whereas GP is implying he wants relevant ones. To flip your example, if I wanted to search for "Barack Obama Anti-Christ," I'd want to get those results back, and not have DDG or whatever other authority decide categorically that I shouldn't see them. "Editorial guidance" is a wide spectrum from favoring what the editor thinks is most relevant for the reader to the editor actively censoring content the reader wants to see for external reasons. To be charitable, I read GP as objecting to the latter and not the former.
- marginalia_nu 3y ago
  I don't think what you want exists or has ever existed. A search engine that does not exercise judgement about relevance and quality will just return noise.
poszlem 3y ago
> but ultimately it's a matter of editorial control, not censorship. So is all censorship. No censor calls censorship "Censorship". An example from my country of birth: Main Office of Control over the Press, Publications and Performances, since 1981 the Main Office of Control over Publications and Performances - the central office of state censorship in the Polish People's Republic. It was a censorship body (analogous institutions were present in all countries of the so-called Eastern Bloc) examining all forms of official information communication from the perspective of their compliance with the current state policy, and prohibiting the dissemination of unwanted information and content by the ruling communist party. The name "The Censors" was only adopted after the collapse of communism. I rub my eyes in amazement every time I read people on HN praising censorship and rejoicing that someone will decide for them what they can read and what they can't. I am not able to understand how foolish one has to be to not realize that eventually the censorship organs will be used against you too. Perhaps you think you will always hold the "correct" beliefs in which case I admire your lack of imagination. I miss "hackers" from the 90s with some actual backbone.
- boredhedgehog 3y ago
  > No censor calls censorship "Censorship". The Catholic Church does. The office of Censor is still part of the official legislation (Can. 830 CIC).
- soundnote 3y ago
  The actual grim part: It's not an "eventually". Even if the censorship downranks and removes results I disagree with and makes me feel warm and fuzzy and enjoy that my political enemies are gnashing their teeth, it can very well rob me of information it'd be useful to know. eg. to this day many people live under the impression that Kyle Rittenhouse shot three black people. If asked to estimate how many unarmed blacks get killed by police, Democrat voters give absolutely wild estimates when according to shooting databases the actual number is about 20 a year. According to a poll D voters thought you had a 50% chance of dying if you caught Covid, which is completely nuts even with the earlier, more dangerous strains. Yet these people think they're well informed and follow the Science™.
elzbardico 3y ago
You know, if the conservatives ever come back to power, this precedent that we are creating on justifying censorship will bit us hard, and it will hurt as hell.
- lisasays 3y ago
  Repeating that this is form of censorship doesn't make it so. Ironically, what DDG is doing is exercise of its free speech rights - pure and simple.
  - matheusmoreira 3y ago
    And we are exrcising our freedoms by recognizing it and calling it out as the censorship it is and preferring alternatives.
    - lisasays 3y ago
      You're free as a bird to say or think anything you want. Still, at the end of the day - the word "censorship" has specific meaning, and it just doesn't apply to this situation.
- waboremo 3y ago
  Conservatives are still the status quo btw
  - elzbardico 3y ago
    It's kind of complicated. The old labels of right and left, conservative vs progressives, and socialist vs capitalists are clearly inadequate nowadays. Class struggle based left has all but disappeared in the West. And whatever your point of view on American involvement in Ukraine, it is clear that at least the mainstream branches of both parties are largely in accord. Trump's belligerence on China (justified or not, I am not discussing this) has not only been embraced by the Democrats and NeverТrumpers on the Republican side, but also has been extended far beyond pure economic war, flirting now with proper kinetic war. Environmental issues, once a solid socialist banner, now have been enthusiastically embraced by Wall Street (I suspect, unfortunately, for not-so-noble reasons beyond banks salivating at the prospect of financing the green transition, and entrepreneurs dreaming about all the opportunities on rebuilding our infrastructure and replacing the entire automobile fleet. Not that is bad in itself, capitalism needs constant growth to be viable, and green rebuilding allows this to happen for a few more decades without utterly destroying our planet). Civil rights also have been solidly co-opted by the oligarchic class. Both for reasons that the moral behavior and values of the elites are fairly advanced and they want to impose their values as the mainstream values down the throats of the more backward working class and because it is useful as it redirects energy from unionization and other forms of class struggle. All of our labels and categories simply don't work to understand this complex scenario.

metalliqaz 3y ago

what do they censor?

nostromo 3y ago
After the invasion of Ukraine they announced they would be removing sites "associated with Russian disinformation." They haven't provided a definition of what that includes. Lots of DDG users were upset because this is the type of thing they objected to with Google.
- soundnote 3y ago
  In DDG's defense, some of the censorship was required by law - we don't know if DDG went further than demanded - and Eich himself will tell you that Brave had to remove some results as well.
  - BrendanEich 3y ago
    No, I never said we removed anything due to some nation state's MiniTrue calling it misinformation or disinformation. All search engines must comply with laws (CSAM, right to be forgotten or whatever it is called now) in various regions. That compliance is not in any way the same category as what DDG boasted in March 2022 that it was doing.
    - soundnote 3y ago
      I didn't try to imply such: Like I said, you had to remove things by law. No? Could've been clearer, I guess.
      - BrendanEich 3y ago
        But DDG did not have to virtue-signal as it did in March 2022 due to force of law or even unlawful threats from a nation-state. Categorically different -- there's no comparison.