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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

by 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."
    - Karunamon 3y ago
      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. No, going by your own website, you outsource that judgment call to an unnamed and unaccountable list of third parties that apply unnamed and unauditable "objective" "journalistic standards" (which are not things that exist), which will then result in entire sites showing lower in the rankings an unspecified amount with no notification to the user that you have done this. If this was actually about spam, there would be no need to bring "journalistic standards" into the equation. Spam is spam regardless of who it comes from. There would be no need to be so coy about all of this.
      - yegg 3y ago
nathan_compton 3y ago
High profile libertarian youtubers and Breitbart readers. Got it.

by sshine 3y ago

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."
  - Karunamon 3y ago
    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. No, going by your own website, you outsource that judgment call to an unnamed and unaccountable list of third parties that apply unnamed and unauditable "objective" "journalistic standards" (which are not things that exist), which will then result in entire sites showing lower in the rankings an unspecified amount with no notification to the user that you have done this. If this was actually about spam, there would be no need to bring "journalistic standards" into the equation. Spam is spam regardless of who it comes from. There would be no need to be so coy about all of this.
    - yegg 3y ago

nathan_compton 3y ago

High profile libertarian youtubers and Breitbart readers. Got it.