4 ms·

I'd use an engine that censors piracy sites over an engine that censors political views any day of the week.

by MarcellusDrum 3y ago

flangola7 3y ago
Eh? Piracy is a strong political act.
nathan_compton 3y ago
I have a sick compulsion to know what censorship you are talking about.
- Firmwarrior 3y ago
  I can't find anything except some half-assed clickbait from the New York Times last year. First they paint DuckDuckGo as the favored search engine for the far-right, then say far right people are furious that it's censoring Russian propaganda I guess that reading between the lines, it could be inferred that some wrongthink is being censored, but I couldn't find any actual info
- sshine 3y ago
  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-disinformation-downranking.html 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.
  - yegg 3y ago
    See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36143328 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/news-rankings/ 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.
    - Karunamon 3y ago
      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 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.
      - yegg 3y ago
        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."
        3y ago
rakoo 3y ago
Do you have any more details ?
- danjoredd 3y ago
  They ended their partnership with Yandex, a Russian search engine, over the war. They also started downplaying Russian search results as a method of preventing misinformation. This led to a bit of controversy because it makes one question, if they are willing to censor over one political issue, what else are they censoring? https://www.protocol.com/bulletins/duckduckgo-yandex-ukraine https://www.protocol.com/bulletins/duckduckgo-yandex-ukraine
  - yegg 3y ago
    See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36143328 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36143328. To be clear, we do not censor. Per the help article referenced above (https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/news-rankings/ https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/ne...): "we don’t evaluate or otherwise take into account any potential political bias or leanings of websites in our search result rankings."
yegg 3y ago
(Hi, I'm the CEO & Founder of DuckDuckGo.) It is simply not true that we have censored anything or made ourselves "the arbiters of truth." I realized I previously explained how our news rankings work very poorly on Twitter but 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://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/news-rankings/ https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/ne... 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."
- Tommstein 3y ago
  I abandoned DuckDuckGo during the Tank Man fiasco, but recently started giving it a chance every now and then. The fact that some page loads figuratively take a literal god damn eternity in Firefox on Android (I'm talking double-digit seconds) put the kibosh on that, Google is still instantaneous.
  - yegg 3y ago
    First off, we do not remove any results ourselves for political purposes and in fact we have been banned in China for many years for that very reason. What you're referring to was a temporary bug in our image search results from Bing that they promptly fixed. If they hadn't fixed it promptly then we would have taken further action. That seems hardly cause to abandon us. That said, super slow results I can understand :). But they are super fast according to all our metrics, so something else must be going on. There was a bug in DarkReader recently causing our page to be slow that was recently fixed -- not sure if that is related. In any case, if you want to email me (my email is my profile) then we can try to get to the bottom of it.
    - Tommstein 3y ago
      I do use Dark Reader. That's a hell of a bug. I'll assume it was that until proven otherwise.
StanislavPetrov 3y ago
> I'd use an engine that censors piracy sites over an engine that censors political views any day of the week. Are you suggesting that Google doesn't censor political views?

I'd use an engine that censors piracy sites over an engine that censors political views any day of the week.

flangola7 3y ago

Eh? Piracy is a strong political act.

nathan_compton 3y ago

I have a sick compulsion to know what censorship you are talking about.

Firmwarrior 3y ago
I can't find anything except some half-assed clickbait from the New York Times last year. First they paint DuckDuckGo as the favored search engine for the far-right, then say far right people are furious that it's censoring Russian propaganda I guess that reading between the lines, it could be inferred that some wrongthink is being censored, but I couldn't find any actual info
sshine 3y ago
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-disinformation-downranking.html 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.
- yegg 3y ago
  See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36143328 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/news-rankings/ 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.
  - Karunamon 3y ago
    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 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.
    - yegg 3y ago
      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."
      - 3y ago

rakoo 3y ago

Do you have any more details ?

danjoredd 3y ago
They ended their partnership with Yandex, a Russian search engine, over the war. They also started downplaying Russian search results as a method of preventing misinformation. This led to a bit of controversy because it makes one question, if they are willing to censor over one political issue, what else are they censoring? https://www.protocol.com/bulletins/duckduckgo-yandex-ukraine https://www.protocol.com/bulletins/duckduckgo-yandex-ukraine
- yegg 3y ago
  See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36143328 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36143328. To be clear, we do not censor. Per the help article referenced above (https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/news-rankings/ https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/ne...): "we don’t evaluate or otherwise take into account any potential political bias or leanings of websites in our search result rankings."

yegg 3y ago

(Hi, I'm the CEO & Founder of DuckDuckGo.) It is simply not true that we have censored anything or made ourselves "the arbiters of truth." I realized I previously explained how our news rankings work very poorly on Twitter but 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://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/news-rankings/ https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/ne... 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."

Tommstein 3y ago
I abandoned DuckDuckGo during the Tank Man fiasco, but recently started giving it a chance every now and then. The fact that some page loads figuratively take a literal god damn eternity in Firefox on Android (I'm talking double-digit seconds) put the kibosh on that, Google is still instantaneous.
- yegg 3y ago
  First off, we do not remove any results ourselves for political purposes and in fact we have been banned in China for many years for that very reason. What you're referring to was a temporary bug in our image search results from Bing that they promptly fixed. If they hadn't fixed it promptly then we would have taken further action. That seems hardly cause to abandon us. That said, super slow results I can understand :). But they are super fast according to all our metrics, so something else must be going on. There was a bug in DarkReader recently causing our page to be slow that was recently fixed -- not sure if that is related. In any case, if you want to email me (my email is my profile) then we can try to get to the bottom of it.
  - Tommstein 3y ago
    I do use Dark Reader. That's a hell of a bug. I'll assume it was that until proven otherwise.

StanislavPetrov 3y ago

> I'd use an engine that censors piracy sites over an engine that censors political views any day of the week. Are you suggesting that Google doesn't censor political views?