I will now trust my own media and sources even less, if they rely on silencing the competition and insist on controlling what I access "for my own good". Such dirty tactics are insulting, even more so when delivered under a sneering benevolent guise.

As if they have perfect knowledge of my motives and wishes. What if I'm genuinely curious as to how the Russian media is presenting this war? They must have access to this perfect knowledge if they are fit to decide which news sources are "correct"!

A lot of malicious actors have learned how to game the search ranking algorithms by making carefully crafted lies that are easily spread as truths online quickly. They are able to get their fake news to spread (and this rank higher) in ways that legitimate sources can't.

Most people only ever look at the first page of results when searching for answers, and, let's be honest, take those answers for the truth.

If you were a search engine provider and knew that viral, fake stories were able to do that, wouldn't not taking action also be making a decision about what you can and can't see? Inaction, in this case, would be tacit approval.

Also you can still search for stories about how Russia is presenting the war, but you have to specifically look for it

Do you? The argument I'm hearing is that most people are stupid and those stupid people aren't smart enough to know better, so the smart people need to control their lives to "protect them." I'm not sure if you realize this but this was the same argument used to perpetuate slavery.

Edit: Elaborated my argument.

If the first page of search engine results about a question contains the answer I wanted to hear (i.e. it confirms my existing biases), I won't often look at page 2.

If the first page "feels wrong" -- like I have a hunch that things are a different way -- I'll read more results or write new queries. I'll also, I would say, 90-95% of the time, consider the possibility that I was wrong. But I'll keep looking for evidence that confirms my own biases, too.

As far as slavery goes, that's one hell of a slippery slope. Owning a website and curating the information on it is tantamount to kidnapping people and exercising ownership over them and their children? That's like saying someone who "hurt" your feelings is engaging in literal torture and murder.

Full disclosure. I grew up in the days when the internet was the wild west and absolutely loved it, so I may be a bit biased :)

Ah, but I was comparing the justification to perpetuate said institutions, not the pain inflicted of the institutions themselves; there's big difference. Perhaps you're right, you shouldn't be allowed to process information as you see fit.

Most places in the world, you're not allowed to own or use weapons as you see fit.

Information is weaponized nowadays.

So of course people are going to seek sources that do not gaslight them and condescendingly hand them down information, expecting them to eat up every bit of it at face value. Corporate media sources aren't encouraging people to ask their own questions, form hypotheses, and investigate further.

On MSNBC's Morning Joe, Mika Brzezinski said herself: "telling the American people what to think is our job".

People HATE that! How arrogant and conceited does one have to be to say something like that with a straight face? She, and the rest of her ilk like Brian Stelter, can get off their high horses and treat people with dignity, and step a level up by encouraging viewers to verify THEIR claims and become their own researchers. Not to mention, CNN has become sex scandal central with their own leadership and staff knowingly neglecting and burying them to damning effect once they've been found later, further dimenishing trust.

One only need look at all the conspiracy theories that have turned out to be 100% true these past 2 years on a myriad of topics; and were called conspiracies strictly in order to silence and control the narrative in a direction that's profitable to the corporate media and other corporations, as they see competing information a threat to their own media and products, respectively.

So I'll finish with this point: give people a break and let them seek alternative information. Chances are, if it's not confirmed or found to be false within 6 months of sharing it, because people in high places lied or slipped up and proved them right, these people will be able to reconcile that. You would be pleasantly surprised how diligent these communities are in spotting their own misinformation and broadcasting those findings freely.

And what they find are usually other sources which gaslight them far more, but whose (dis)information they then proselytise as if they've Done Their Own Research and finally Seen The Light.

It's telling intelligent people they are less capable than they really are. Truly, no one can make that suggestion without some level of hubris and high-horsed thinking, undeserving of anyone's attention.

Again, these are valid reasons why so many people do no trust our institutions responsible for conveying accurate information with as little bias as possible, which barely exists today, and thus independent journalism has quite successfully taken their place, and as a result, corporate media giants attack these lesser sources as their viewers and ratings observably and objectively plummet (as reported).

Not to you, perhaps, but it looks to me like this is because you have a weird definition of gaslighting.

> Gaslighting your audience means you, as a publisher of information, openly states to your viewers that they aren't capable of finding credible information themselves, and discerning what's true or false.

No. As I've understood it, the whole idea is not to say that openly, but only to imply it, so your audience (=victim) comes to the erroneous conclusion that yours is the only "truth" they can trust on their own.

> It's also the process of declaring information as "misinformation" and having your audience prove you wrong over and over again — or through more official processes like Congressional hearings, courts, etc. finding that swaths of information shared by the corporate media was largely false after all.

Huh? That's "the process of" gaslighting?!? No, that has absolutely fuck-all to do with it, AFAIK. Pretty sure Hitchcock wouldn't have the faintest idea WTF you're on about. I, OTOH, (unfortunately) do have all too good an idea of what this rant means: That you are yourself thoroughly gaslighted -- or fully brainwashed -- by stark raving MAGAhats.

Anyway, moving on, I think you make some good points. Absoultely, so-called MSM has gaslighted people on various occasions. But that doesn't disprove the "duped by information campaigns" premise, it supports it. People are distrustful of MSM because they have been successfully deceived in the past. Millions were duped into thinking that the Iraq War was honestly precipitated by weapons of mass distruction not only because they were lied to by the government but because it was aided by passionate support in MSM, notoriously the New York Times.

And I'm not sold on the idea that communities are diligent in spotting their own misinformation. Look how homeopathy and astrology persist, generations after they have been shown to be bunk. In the case of homeopathy, people often seek it out because they feel duped and misled by Big Pharama. And that's a mistake that people make. They are rightfully skeptical of a mainstream idea but then latch on to an even more dubious idea because it seems like arcane truth, the fruit of their own research against the Brzezinski-esque medical establishment telling them what's for their own good. And then, because of the sunk cost fallacy, they hold onto the bad idea far longer than they should, even propagating it like a religion.

"One only need look at all the conspiracy theories that have turned out to be 100% true these past 2 years." What did you have in mind? I can only think of maybe one (non mainstream I presume) conspiracy theory that turned out to be 100% true. Most of the time, and this is key, just because the mainstream theory had flaws doesn't mean any of its concomitant conspiracy theories were 100% correct. In general they aren't, because like cancer cells they lack a control mechanism to keep them from continuously mutating. Plausible election irregularities turn into pallets of ballots, which turn into the ghost of Hugo Chavez owning voting machines, etc.

One of the problems with deciding to eschew mainstream sources of information, is that you often have no way of determining truth value through your own personal experience or expertise. I'm not a physician, epidemiologist or virologist. In order to conclude anything, I have to have faith that data provided by other people is accurate. In the past, unreliable sources of information were naturally lost over time because they got no support. But with SEO, spam, and/or astroturfing, any bit of misinformation can be propagated as broadly as the truth. And people are expected to wade through that and stumble upon the facts? Maybe, but have you heard of Borges' Library of Babel[0]? It's a story describing an infinite library where volumes are printed with random text, so every possible permutation of letters is there. Everything that is true is there, but so is every lie, and every near truth. But because all information is equally available without regard for truth, the library is effectively useless. That's what an entirely uncurated internet becomes.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Library_of_Babel

I don't disagree with most of what you said, but I don't think that's a justification for censorship. The non-curated internet did come up with Wikipedia and a lot of great sources. Some of those sources go from great to bad. Do you trust Amazon reviews? I don't but I used to; I think a lot of people feel the same way. Amazon tried to "fix" it by censoring what it felt were bad reviews, but it didn't seem to work.

I think the main disinformation comes from politics, which, by nature is disinformation. I don't think that, to paraphrase, "people believe dumb things," is a good justification for censorship. Think about what passed as truth in 1850 or even 1920. Darwin of course was censored and the Snopes trial are just examples of where any type of censorship, allowed to stand, halts the progress of a civilization.

> I don't think that, to paraphrase, "people believe dumb things," is a good justification for censorship.

You keep saying "censorship". Downweighting disinformation search results is far from censorship; it's just un-gaming the trolls' SEO gaming.

But more often than not their reaction to questioning bad information they have shared is "I'm not stupid! I though someone smart like you would get it. It's not rocket science" ..

Yup, exactly. And that argument is correct.

> this was the same argument used to perpetuate slavery.

> Edit: Elaborated my argument.

No, created a huge strawman.

And the "plebs" would still "be allowed to hear and see" the fake news; un-gaming the Troll SEO will just put their dreck down on the eighth page of search results where it belongs, in stead of the first. (Well, "will"... Easily could, if it gets implemented that way. Which is all at least I would ask of the search engines.)

> If you were a search engine provider and knew that viral, fake stories

How does the search engine company know whether something is true or not?

That actually maps to how we work as a society.

We cannot be experts in everything, we do not have the time, ability, wherewithal.

So we 'trust' certain sources: Teachers, Doctors, Lawyers, Judges, Police, more than we do others i.e. criminals, sources of gossip, arbitrary people.

This is why when people form those institutions fail us, it's a much bigger problem than otherwise. We should fire a teacher for teaching things that are wrong, but we don't worry about the guy walking down the street spouting nonsense.

Over time, we learn who to trust, and also the ways in which we can trust them. 'Nature' has a lot of credibility in some ways, but it also doesn't mean they are always right, and, when it comes to softer issue, they can be politicised.

Judges have more integrity than the average person, but they can also be biased.

The NYT is a good source of information, but it depends if it's 'straight news or opinion'.

Putin has a 'propaganda Army' of people trying to convince people of certain things, much of which are not true. People around the world will believe it if they are exposed to enough of it.

The Russian and Cheese population apparently are willing to believe that UKR government is a bunch of 'Nazis and Drug Dealers'. Which is perverse.

'Information Reputation' is a really big deal and the only way it will work as a society is if we give the 'Conch' to those with greater credibility, otherwise, people will believe in 'whatever'. You can tell people almost anything and 30% of them will believe it if they want to, which is enough people to tilt the needle on so many issues.

Is this that same newspaper that was one of the primary cheerleaders for the US invasion of Iraq?

Bias and lack of integrity is not actually very hard to spot.

It's ultimately nuanced, but it's not rocket science.

The challenge is not really with institutions, there are not that many of them, but rather with social media, individuals, commenters, state actors posing as 'regular people' etc..

Try Fox News vs New York Times.

> It's ultimately nuanced, but it's not rocket science. The challenge is not really with institutions, there are not that many of them, but rather with social media, individuals, commenters, state actors posing as 'regular people' etc..

Scoring how much you trust an entity to determine the truthfulness of information they are generating is flawed.

In no way does this properly verify information’s truthfulness in and of itself.

Even scoring “Information.Source.Trust Score”, which is just a single aspect of information, is still far more difficult to do than you apparently realize. How can a human build such a score with no bias?

Also, 'editorial' vs. 'news' are actually different categories and we know what they are.

'Fox 5' - their evening show is pure gossip and innuendo - it has nothing to do with reality or the truth. Their nighthime 'personalities' are editorialists. But they do have regular news segments as well.

All of that can be categorised.

Also, the source of their bias can be roughly identified. Mostly they are a corporate entity playing to an American audience. They have some relationship with the White House on some occasions.

We can delineate.

Because it's a fairly established institution, we can also look at the other kinds of bias. And of course, each personality is different.

They are not owned and controlled by the Kremlin, or the Canadian Government as is, the CBC for example. We can delineate there.

It's really not that hard.

And FYI it's not as though there is hard censorship - you can retrieve Putins' own 'Mein Kamp-ish' rants any time with fairly easy searches.

What we don't want is bad misinformation seeping into the top of arbitrary searches etc..

If someone wants to read 'My Pillow Guy' that's fine, but his opinion on Putin is not going to come up up first when I search 'Putin', unless there's some other, factual, direct relevance.

Not for you, perhaps, and probably not on DDG (the original subject here). But AIUI the Google algorithm takes into account not only your actual search terms, but your browsing and search histories. So if you're a poor deluded MAGA dupe who's read too much of Mr. Lindell's rants before, it seems utterly plausible to me that at least Google would be only too happy to feed you more of his ravings. And it feels quite likely that Bing, f. ex, would work the same.

Search is a tool for me to use: give me better control of the results that I can get. Choosing between different ranking algorithms would be wonderful too, to skip around different SEO strategies

Even if you _could_ find a user who wants their client to hide information from them, that user probably doesn't want to filter their own spam, too. By default, the client already expects the server to fulfill a gatekeeping role in filtering (censoring!) spam. In fact, this is how we got here in the first place – we delegated filtering mechanisms to service providers, and now they're simply expanding the filter.

Personally, I'm in favor of a simple but likely effective regulation: Any service that renders a feed of third-party content to the user must default to sorting the feed in reverse chronological order, and must reset all current users to this default on the day the legislation goes into effect. Of course, this only mitigates the feed-based, mostly social-media problem — it doesn't solve the issues with search results (or auto-complete suggestions, for that matter). For search results, a client-based model wouldn't scale, as client preferences need to be evaluated at time of indexing, not when returning results.

It is really irresponsible to be phrasing censorship as a "responsibility". Censorship is a tool of the weak and simple-minded so that they can maintain the illusions of a shared reality promulgated by whoever is in charge. The only responsibility should be towards the free and unadulterated flow of information, and yes, it is the individual's responsibility to make sense of that in a civilized fashion.

My only exception to this rule is for things that are irrelevant to seeker's intent to acquire more information, advertising falls into this bucket.

How is blocking spam and advertisement materially different than blocking a foreign actor's propaganda?

You don't see Google censoring ads much.

There's nothing in their business they censor more.

This is how a lot of email clients currently work, but it is not a fundamental law of the universe. Back in the day, you could run programs on your computer that would filter spam automatically based on criteria and examples you specified. For example, see https://daringfireball.net/2003/09/interview_michael_tsai

The fact that people would pay money for such a program highlights the difference between spam filtering and censorship: spam filtering hides things that I don't want to see, while censorship hides things that other people don't want me to see.

All this does is sort is allow gamification of search results based on the time of creation for the content. The quality of search instantly will go into the dumpster.

As you should! It's actually exactly what authoritarian governments like Russia do. They silence and control information, blocking out other sources aside from their own propaganda. Everything else is said to be dangerous disinformation.

Essentially, they can't give you the details. Sometimes they lie, for national security, operational security, or even pathological, political reasons.

I guess the one takeaway that's stuck in my mind from this morass is that the people who led us to war in Iraq should have gone to jail. That would have been the only way to maintain the integrity of the security apparatus they misused to trick their nations into going along with it.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4PbCiHOtR8

Just FYI as how the east is looking at this.

Sure, and I think that's why Russia more or less got away with Crimea and Donbas. But this kind of open invasion seems like a different level, something we haven't seen (post-9/11 notwithstanding) since Serbia/Kosovo, and indeed that's the parallel Russia often draws - but the justification for that was a well-documented massacre of civilians. Is that kind of thing evidenced in what the Azov Battalion et al are accused of? (Genuine question, I'm interested to hear what's being said on every side).

I don’t disagree with this, but I don’t think the burden should entirely be on us common folk. We are the ones being lied to. We can’t only focus on “staying informed,” it is critical that we start demanding the truth from the institutions we’re supposed to trust. If they don’t change, we need new institutions.

I agree we need new and federated institutions — particularly around things like intelligence.

There isn't much in the way of alternatives either. When they do pop up, they are coincidentally labeled as "misinformation," and censored.

The west is not remotely like Russia in this matter.

No, not such as that, because there are other places you can talk about it and reporters are free to report it in their own publications.

Meanwhile in Russia, mentioning things that go against the official line gets you actually imprisoned for years.

Get a grip. You are not being oppressed. You may need to spend less time consuming social media though, and realise that what facebook or twitter allow is not the whole world, just a noisy subset. You are allowed to post your hunter biden conspiracy theories elsewhere, you can even stand up your own website and post it all there, and the worst that will happen is people will laugh at you. In Russia you are not.

Personally I dont see how anout with more than a single IQ point can hold such a belief honestly in good faith, but clearly plenty do.

It's a sad state of affairs, but since the invasion started my only source of "news" related to the war is a few, and I a said a FEW, Youtube channels.

I'm brazilian and one channel I recommend is Fernando Ulrich's channel. He interviewed (in english) a lot people (ukrainians, russians), commented on the geopolitical causes for the war a month before it started for real etc.

Through his channel I found the lectures by John J Mearsheimer, and that's the only reason I can say that I "understand" what the hell is happening over there.

It's a real shame that a financial advice channel, from a 3rd world country, is the last bastion of thrust I can find in order to get informed about the most important geopolitical event of the last decade. The mainstream media/tech oligopoly are a disgrace to mankind.

When I worked at a large news site, every time there was a significant event, people flocked to the usual sources immediately demanding answers NOW. Whoever gives any answer first or gives the most spectacular answer, wins. Be that traditional media, social networks, bloggers, politicians etc. Almost nobody cares about the veracity of the information if they feel good about themselves being informed and what they hear sounds right.

There is a ton a valid issues to be talked about when it comes about trustworthiness of different media. But I think also as societies we need to get better at living with ambiguity instead of basically asking to be click-baited constantly.

No, you can't. It really comes down to a choice of which unhinged violent group of psychopaths do you want to believe.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqKfSbhm6yo This is a great explanation of the anarchist perspective.

Great quote:

"Ukraine has been this mess for many many many years of people arguing about which of authoritarian control freaks should get violently dominate everybody. That is a question that doesn't have a right answer."

It's one of the key goals of Russian information warfare: to create a feeling that you can't tell truth apart from fiction, and to force you into apathy and paralyze you, so you become unable to act and protect your interests. Russians are among the largest pushers of conspiracy theories from Covid to QAnon, and have been for a very long time, because it is cheap and very effective way to divide free societies into infighting groups. NYC station chief of Russian foreign intelligence used to visit public libraries to post conspiracy theories on Geocities in 1990s -- that's how important it was and remains.

They flood all available channels with utter nonsense to make people turn their brains off. Just today a general and the spokesperson for Russians Ministry of Defense tried to justify the war by saying that the United States was training migratory birds in secret Ukrainian laboratories to carry dangerous pathogens into Russia: https://redd.it/tb6sn8 Antivaxx groups have already switched to parroting such crap, because many of them are seeded by Russia.

By the way, Mearsheimer is an idiot and nobody takes him seriously in Eastern Europe. You might as well read books by Nazis explaining why Germans had the right to Lebensraum in the East. Instead of precompiled knowledge provided by TV talking heads or authoritative-appearing "experts", I recommend building up knowledge from basic building blocks. Start by reading general histories of the regions you are interested in to understand historic difficulties that people in those places have faced over the past several centuries and what their current goals and motivations are. Then you don't need Mearsheimers to tell you what's going on, you can derive it from your knowledge. This applies to everything else too. If you know a thing or two about basic statistics, then you're much less likely to fall for bullshit narratives like Covid conspiracy theories from people who look trustworthy. Knowledge is power.

Maybe they should have listened to that idiot when he suggested in 1993 that Ukraine retains some of its nuclear weapons to deter Russia from attacking it in the future.

Controlling opinions is a more terrifying weapon than even atomic bombs, because you can actually make use of it, every day, every minute, and it cannot be that easily regulated.

Because .. you say so? His argumentation stands on its own. Yours on the other hand, doesn't. I suggest you practice what you preach after toning down calling your betters "idiots" and educate yourself.

were you born yesterday? do you not remember the iraq war? babies in incubators? vietnam? syrian gas attacks? russiagate? qanon? the 2014 ukraine coup? these are all things created by western TLAs. im not gonna read anything else you wrote but i noticed at the bottom you said

“knowledge is power”

wow thanks for that powerful insight!

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/26/world/from-the-editors-th...

Here's the NY Times less than a month into the invasion noting that no active chemical weapons program had been found and that the administration's words seemed to be shifting about whether they believed it would ever be found: https://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/05/world/a-nation-at-war-ill...

Meanwhile, those who watched Fox News were never told that the earlier finds were not ongoing chemical weapons programs: https://www.politico.com/story/2015/01/poll-republicans-wmds...

I'm not so sure about this. What makes you believe so?

They seem to have pretty smart people to be able to predict this behavior then. Doesn't mean this behavior should be condoned.

This was also overtly one of the goals of Trump's political messaging. In the past, American politicians merely hid or distorted unpleasant facts. Trump and his political strategists instead attacked the problem head-on, tapping into populist skepticism and anti-intellectualism in order to promulgate the idea that all truth is relative and that correctness is a matter of opinion.

Of course, all politicians benefit from this state of affairs. Hence all this empty "fact-checking" that actually just exacerbates the problem.

So you know the whole thing is not principled but rather political.

FB seems to be pretty clear that the calls for violence are allowed only in the context of the Ukrainian war and only against invading forces plus Putin himself.

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/exclusive-facebook-inst...

Next time we, the US, for good or bad reasons invade some place, can now those affected use FB to call for violence against us? What about allowing us to make calls for violence against them, if we think them so bad we must invade them, let's say North Korea? Or, why not? Can Uighurs call for violence against Chinese? We can come up with lots of examples, People in the Tigray against Ethiopians?

It's not just allowing calls for violence against Putin or his generals and conscripts...

It's BS.

That’s not about silencing the competition that’s about doing the basic functions you’re looking for in a search engine. Delisting would be another story as people may legitimately want to find flat earth content, but this isn’t delisting the content is still there you just need to specifically look for it.

It should if that's what their unbiased parameters bubble up. What's bs is hardcoded censorship/downranking of searches based on (geo)political ideology of the ddg owners.

Hyperbole much?

Putting known-bad information sources further down the result list is hardly silencing the competition, in fact it's likely making the results a lot better for the majority of users.

> What if I'm genuinely curious as to how the Russian media is presenting this war?

Then I imagine you can search for that and find it just fine.

> They must have access to this perfect knowledge if they are fit to decide which news sources are "correct"!

Then search rankings are all wrong, from the very concept of such things upwards, because they all seek to rank information quality in various ways, and you should never use them. Any of them.

Honestly these reactions are ridiculous.

I have no understanding of why you would say this is not happening when product brands like GOOP make tons of money from outright hocus pocus health bs.

OTOH, you’re right Steve Jobs and what he did...yikes. That sort of thinking is harmful for society.

Yes GOOP is disgusting. So disgusting.

I thi

OTOH, you’re right Steve Jobs and what he did...yikes. That sort of thinking is harmful for society.

Yes GOOP is disgusting. So disgusting.

None of this is close to laws being passed for serious misinformation sort of stuff like your original post said. GOOP is bullshit and like so much others. It just happens to be peddled by some famous people. Since the ivermectin thing is more complicated, it doesn’t work.

America having its massive problem with opoids and how much it got prescribed shows how difficult the situation is. Or how anti steroids America and the world is. It seems too nuanced and difficult to decipher. Or to say one way is correct.

Overall in spirit and likely general vibes. I believe we are overall closer to the same thinking than not.

Eventually, Amazon started getting rid of all these reviews. There are still fake reviews but they're more subtle than that. So now I have lost my signal that said "tread carefully for products in this class" and I have lost some signal that said "this product has fakers involved or in its competitors".

So now, yes, I trust Amazon less.

I am not making up a hypothetical universe. I am sure others have shared this experience.

If the answer is that you never would, then you are not advocating for something that protects you, just those that you see as inferior to you

Unfortunately, there's a wide ecosystem of conspiracy minded sites that link to each other. They even have papers supporting them, eg. studies in favor of homeopathy https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9310601/

"An homeopath died from overdose. He forgot to take his medicaments..."

Most of us have a STEM background, a critical spirit forged by scientific method, we usually don't forge an opinion after reading a single source, and most of us know how to (at least roughly) estimate the trustworthiness of online content, based on simple factors - how clickbait is the title? what sources are cited? how many ads and invites to join Telegram channels are on the page? how is the weight balanced between facts and opinions?

So some of us may rightfully feel insulted when tech players like DDG decide to take down disinformation or rank it down. We don't like being babysitted, we feel that we're smart enough to read content from multiple sources and apply our discernment to come up with a reasonable synthesis. We don't like it when somebody puts the garbage out of our sight, because we may be curious to investigate that garbage.

The average Joe out there, however, doesn't have such skills. The average Joe isn't yet used to the bombardment of information of the 21st century. The average Joe still reads a headline without reading the content, because they went within a couple of years from following 1-2 news channels to being bombarded by algorithmic-curated infinite timelines and search results, and they don't know how to process it all. And, if the headline resonates enough with his/her biases, they reshare it blindly. The average Joe won't collect data from Statista to figure out how economic and political metrics shape events. The average Joe wants somebody who does the synthesis work for them and distills information into a headline that they can easily grab. I know this well because it's what most of my family contacts do.

And disinformation players know this quite well. They have figured out how ranking algorithms work, they know how to craft content in a way that it gets viral, and they know the SEO rudiments well enough to push it up in the search results.

So keep in mind that such measures aren't taken for people like us, but for the majority of people out there that are much more vulnerable than us to disinformation and to its psychological tricks. When I look at things from this perspective, I am grateful for tech players who take actions like these. After all, if I want to dig enough I can still find the "Russian perspective", and I can still analyze it and/or debunk it. But I'm happy that the average Joe doesn't have to be exposed to this sh*t anymore.

The only downside of such measures is the usual one when you implement any form of arbitrary information filtering/ranking: disinformation won't go away, it'll just go deeper underground, where it's harder to monitor. This is already the case: lots of false beliefs held by my family and acquaintances don't come from content published on websites, but content shared on Telegram groups (often involving deep fake videos, snippets from movies and music videos repackaged as memes about real war events, videos of Putin speeches with completely wrong subtitles, and so on). It's easier for a fact checker to monitor disinformation openly published on the web rather than on a myriad of chat groups. And I don't think that anybody has a solution for this problem yet.

Search results should return good information that is relevant to your query, and filter out anything that is not that.

I am not saying there's nothing to be done here - but let's not pretend it's easy and obvious and there's some objective way to see what's "good information" that does not involve a lot of human judgement and a lot of bias that comes with it.

It’s impossible to quantify a rating based on these subjective qualities you listed. I think the point is you can’t remove the human element from ranking search results without leaving the search engine open to exploitation.

The point is that there is no such thing as a perfect arbiter of truth. I may trust a friend with whom I have a close personal relationship to always tell me the truth, but it seems foolish to place that kind of trust in a corporation full of people you don't know.

In the end, we're back to just not filtering information at all, but instead leaving it up to each individual to decide what's true and which isn't. This also clearly has not worked. Maybe this problem is just not solvable.

But that’s not truth either. While gaining a 20/20 truth picture is hard, it’s not impossible to get a picture that’s accurate enough.

Lots of information can be lock-stepped into a picture that gives enough clarity. A combination of experts, reports and documentation, high quality sources, context awareness, and people I know around the globe gives me a good enough picture.

Also the message that there is no such thing as truth is exactly what disinformation strategists want to amplify.

Yes it’s worrying, but not unsolvable.

Should DDG take into account what is and isn't fact-checked? Absolutely, and if DDG gets better at this, their users will benefit.

Truth is "not subjective" in the sense that force of will can't change the answer to even very fraught questions like "what programming paradigm works best in situation X" or "which running back would do best on team X in superbowl Y".

But one's judgement on the truth of complex question depends on one's opinions on the meaning of various terms, reliability of various individuals, the dynamics of human psychology, etc. This overall situation results in people's opinions being hard to compare and "truth is subjective" is often shorthand for this, although it would be nicer to have a different word.

Truth gets you about 1% of the way towards returning "good information". What are the ideal search results for "orange"?

Orange is also the name of a town in some places, and a county in others. But I think you need more search terms in order to disambiguate. The search engine can't read minds, after all.

My point is, there's no objective way to determine what good search results are. There are thousands of different objective measurements which people combine in subjective ways to create a subjective algorithm.

A higher quality information media will give you the tools to get more information, and this is for example where wikipedia shines by requiring citations. Even if some piece of information there is wrong, you usually get the tools to obtain more information, and you get a summary (where they do attempt to stay neutral) of multiple positions when there is no consensus.

Quality of information is not precisely equals to truth, some questions to ask of any information relay: - Do they give you the sources for their information ? - Do they make a good faith attempt to stay neutral ? - If not staying neutral, do they make their position and conflicts of interest clear ? - Do they provide adequate (non-strawmen) summaries of opposing views ? - What is their process for correcting information ?

Of course wikipedia isn't perfect, but it is a higher than average quality of information on the internet. You should use wikipedia (or any source really) as an authoritative source (something isn't tree just because it is written their), but it is an excellent starting point. As most other good sources of information are.

You can't easily judge the veracity of any piece of information on any platform, but you can more easily judge a good faith attempt at providing you the tools to obtain further information.

No platform is going to be perfect, but these criteria should help anyone to filter out bad news sources, and it should not be impossible to convince most people that these are good criteria.

What else can a filter be aside from a bias? Clearly, I'd want a search engine that's biased against spam and generally against "automatically generated" content.

It's hard for people to wrap their heads around how many search judgements are inherently editorial decisions - and how much of this is OK. One factor is that mainstream American news, from Hearst to the NY Times spent a long indoctrinating people on the claim that their position in the political spectrum was "balanced" where everything else was "extreme".

One actually useful thing a search engine could do is allow it's users to see it's biases and even configure their particular preferred filters - within reason. Could be a selling point.

That seems like a cop-out to me. They're not filtering "spam or malware", they're filtering "Russian disinformation". What's next? Maybe OAN is "right-wing disinformation" and we should "filter" that too? What about fox news? How far can you use that excuse to say you're not biased?

For as much whining here about the importance of free and open discussion, it's unfortunately verboten to say it, but fortunately people will usually bring it up of their own volition. It is like the "why are all the highly educated people so liberal!?!?" thing, deep down you know the answer, and it's not actually "because of liberal indoctrination!", it's that truth itself has a bias, and so "unbiased" results that merely prefer truthiness can have a bias themselves. The fix for that isn't to present both as equally reputable (or worse, for the answer to be "unknowable" simply because "two parties disagree"), it's for the affected party to stop pushing disinformation and falsehoods.

Not all sources are created equal. Not even all news sources are created equal. And if you agree to that, then we agree on the merits, and it's just the outcomes that you disagree with.

(And lest you disagree - Fox News themselves went to court to argue that their programming is not "news media" and is not intended to be a source of truth, in response to slander/libel suits for saying and writing things that are factually untrue to service their political agenda. So even Fox News agrees they should have a lesser "reputation score" than even other news media.)

https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/new-yor...

Example: Nature published Flaxman2020, a modelling paper by the epidemiology team at ICL which claimed lockdowns saved 3.1 million lives. People who actually read the article realized that it was a massive exercise in circular logic - the model assumed that any reductions in case numbers could only be due to government intervention. It was then presented as proof to the media that lockdowns saved lives. It had many other problems - in fact the authors themselves in the paper itself that it was illustrative only and that in reality, the effectiveness of NPIs would be lower. The circular nature of the argument was pointed out immediately but Nature only published a response letter 8 months after publication, and never retracted it.

As for your legal point, that doesn't mean much. Lawyers try any argument that might work. Facebook have argued in front of the court that their fact checking isn't actually fact checking at all, that it's in reality merely corporate political opinion, and that no reasonable person could possibly construe otherwise!

No, I'm not willing to let them off the hook so easily. Why were they in a court of law in the first place? Because they lied to such an extent that it's literally illegal. If this hail-mary legal argument of "no reasonable person would believe us" was the best defence they could come up with, then that is approximately the most powerful indictment of their veracity as is possible to legally establish within our current framework. We should not let them live it down - they cannot have their cake and eat it.

At any rate, do you really think other news companies or talking heads never say things others think are untrue? The reason Fox ended up in a lawsuit is because people on the left are much more determined to take out anyone saying things they don't like than the other way around. It's not because CNN is actually more reliable.

Quoting this without understanding the philosophy of science, in context of discussion rejecting an equivalence between cable television and a peer-reviewed journal, seems like textbook whataboutism.

All published science is wrong to some degree. The point is to be less wrong, in gestalt, as time goes on. We push back the boundaries of ignorance to discover more. TV punditry echo chambers, where they revel in wrongness, are the antithesis of this process.

Yes, humans have biases. There's not a way around it.

> What does that mean when applied to duckduckgo's tweet from 2019?

Yes, that tweet is obviously a vague marketing message, but if you read the entire quote in context, it was in reference to filter-bubble biases. It wasn't a claim that DDG employees are somehow superhuman creatures immune to human biases. Obviously that's a ridiculous interpretation.

Here's the source, in context:

https://spreadprivacy.com/why-use-duckduckgo-instead-of-goog...

Search results are created by humans and intended to be consumed by humans, so yes. (And just to head it off, a web crawler is ultimately just an abstraction for the humans who will later consume the search results, it just happens to have particularly fast and strict browsing habits)

Now that said, accepting that "(un)biased" is an extremely broad term, I'd very easily believe that the intent of the tweet was to point at some specific type of bias that DDG (at the time) intended to avoid.

Short answer yes, if humans are involved in making something it’s going to be subjected to the biases of those humans.

https://nyupress.org/9781479837243/algorithms-of-oppression/

Frankly, I'd be surprised if there weren't implicit biases already there.

But this is something new. Its overt, explicit.

All search engines are explicitly biased. That is the point, they generate a ranking of results. Heck even how you tokenize text is an explicit bias of what you match against.

If you're arguing search engines should bias for what you want to see then it shouldn't be ranking russian propaganda highly for western audiences, if you are arguing search engines should bias for facts then by definition it shouldn't be ranking russian propaganda highly.

Which is spam.

Then they would also filter ukrainian, NATO, EU, US, etc disinformation. Almost all the disinformation that you see on social media ( western ) is ukrainian, NATO, EU, US, etc disinformation since russia has self-isolated itself to some degree and much of russian media/propaganda has been banned.

If DDG said we will down-rank sites associated with Ukranian, NATO, US disinformation, then maybe we could give them a benefit of the doubt.

The Russian and Ukrainian sides are not moral equals.

If Russia says Ukraine is full of drug addicts, whores and nazis, and that bombing hospitals is necessary to protect itself from Ukraine - that's of course disinformation.

If Ukraine says they have killed 10,000 Russian soldiers, when the real number is closer to 5,000 - that too is disinformation (exaggeration) and I'm not interested in seeing it strictly censored for multiple reasons. 1) It's not a radical exaggeration, such as claiming they've killed 250,000 soldiers or entirely stopped the Russian assault; and 2) it contains quite interesting information: a claim of significant invader deaths (from the supposedly mighty Russian military), which prompts inquiry as to just how bad Russia is fairing. While Ukraine for example has exaggerated their successes, their successes have been remarkable and have shown Russia to be mismanaged, incompetent, weak, and everything else one would expect of a typical authoritarian regime - it looks like a duck, it quacks like a duck, and how wonderful it is a duck. Probably the most remarkable thing about Putin's Russia - considering the kleptocracy - was that it had supposedly managed to maintain a very potent, mostly competent military, which is unusual for such a long authoritarian slog. That turned out to be false, Putin is wildly incompetent as are most authoritarians historically. He's no different than what we've seen in the past with other strong-man dictatorships like Hussein (also a paper tiger military, no coincidence the US chewed through their mediocre Soviet hardware too).

Not all disinformation provides anything valuable to the context as far as anti-fog-of-war information goes. Some disinformation is particularly worthless garbage. Plenty of what Ukraine is revealing does reveal valuable information, whereas very little of what Russia has been saying does the same.

And morally I'm not interested in Russia winning. I'm interested in Russia losing in humiliating fashion, getting isolated, having its economy chopped down by 75%, and in the coming decades seeing the nation split into three or four countries and overall massively weakened to prevent the Russian empire from attempting to emerge again with the next Putin that must inherently follow from their culture of power and conquest lust.

I'm no more interested in leveling the playing field for Russia as I would be for Nazi Germany. They're increasingly similar monsters, and Putin is only likely to get worse as time continues on. The absolute last thing the West should do is treat Ukraine and Russia similarly. We should do whatever it takes to defeat Russia, including winning the propaganda war - the only alternative is to vacate that space to Russia (a neutral outcome in propaganda is next to impossible).

And doesn't make you excited for the war and enthusiastic about joining the fight for Ukraine? Great - but having only information and announcements from one side would give me pause. Somehow the war hasn't ended yet, despite of the zillions of Russian tanks that have been destroyed by now.

Well if we're going to be pedantic and childish, then for your information, Russia started the war with 12.3 zillion tanks and the war is still going on because the Russians still have more tanks. The fact that zillions of tanks have been destroyed and that Russia still has plenty more tanks is not somehow a proof that the information about destroyed Russian tanks is false...

Actually this story is really "wag the dog" style https://waronfakes.com/civil/fake-russian-aviation-struck-a-...

Every story you read now is propaganda. West is just better and more experienced in this stuff than Russia.

>I'm interested in Russia losing in humiliating fashion, getting isolated, having its economy chopped down by 75%, and in the coming decades seeing the nation split into three or four countries and overall massively weakened

This scenario includes about 150 millions of people dead/suffering and world economy wrecked. How is this "moral"?

You have such a good eye for propaganda! Congrats. Thanks for the education I will make waronfakes.com my homepage. From flipping link to link it looks perfectly fine, covers everything from all parties: Ukraine lying, NATO lying, lies about Russia lying, lies about DNR/LNR. Perfectly balanced

> We are the owners and administrators of several Russian non-political telegram channels.

> We don't do politics. But we consider it important to provide unbiased information about what is happening in Ukraine and on the territories of Donbass, because we see signs of an information war launched against Russia.

Granted, I would have liked to see a "FAKE: US funding biological weapon labs in Ukraine" there too.

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/03/11/1566-m11.html

And then all of your subsequent comments seem to be extremely consistent with Russian government talking points.

You were initially kind of concerned that the invasion was not justified, but now you believe the Russian government positions whole-heartedly?

It is a very interesting transition of opinion in a short amount of time! What's up?

I've also witnessed a lot of biased "journalism" in India to push that unreasonable narrative.

That's more likely propaganda doubled as a humorous reminder of the WMD in 2003, in my opinion.

This article for example is just re-printing Russian government talking points:

https://waronfakes.com/civil/fake-russian-soldiers-wont-let-...

Which is fine, the authors can believe the Russian government if you want, but declaring the statements of the other side "fake" on only that basis isn't very credible.

I think there is a lot of projection in your goal here, but that is beside the point.

DDG also already downranks outlets that are not related to Russia.

You could argue however that this a good bias to have, and that's definitely a discussion that deserves to be had and where I'm personally not decided. However, it's good to agree that this is indeed a bias beforehand.

This is important stuff to know. I did a few sample searches. The results aren’t wrong. They are incredibly dry. Many being direct studies and long PDFs. People aren’t going to go through that stuff when seeing how Russia is getting rekt or Ukraine is suffering or gas prices are up are consumable via many pics, quick takes, social media takes, and more.

I think it’s important also because of your wording. Russia being the kleptocracy. You didn’t say the west isn’t. It is heavily implied IMO though.

Another unfortunate issue is this all will cloud the west in even more misinformation. The best non dense news knowledge from TV I gained regarding Yemen was from RT. The west is awful at covering the tragedy there. Not to mention complicit too. RT was slanted ofc. Not saying that’s what should be aimed for.

Similarly if Russian economy collapsing by 75% and screwing with the lives of 100M avg Russians as it splits into 3 or 4 is something to aim for. The non mention of NATO being a pointless organization today but especially in a collapsed Russia world would be good to know. That info won’t be given out much I presume. Also to note. No one really suffers remotely like 100M+ Russians if NATO disbanded. Though I’m sure the massive amt of misinformation when the west doesn’t want to keep helping out the millions of Russian refugees in your dreamt future will be absolutely insane. Just like relatively minor amounts of refugees now keep getting called things like the migrant crisis.

Russia should not be hurting and killing Ukrainians. America and others should not be helping Yemen or Palestine or other places have innocents suffering or killed. Most of all, we shouldn’t get ourselves into a state where we keep patting ourselves on the back and pointing to boogeymen to escape culpability. Which is pretty much guaranteed in a future of a collapsed Russia with millions of refugees that NATO will have little interest in helping but will engage in a massive amt of misinformation to escape the very obvious moral failings. At least this is all almost certain to happen based on the present (excluding the help Ukrainian refugees are getting which may be proving the pt more by being such a markedly unique exception) and past.

WHY ISNT MY RIDICULOUS OPINION BEING PRESENTED AS FACT BY THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA??????????????

You realize how insane your arguments are, right?

*I was obviously exaggerating with “non mention”. It was also one small part in my thought out, serious and long comment.

However your exaggerations of all caps, “being presented as fact” and “ridiculous opinion” (again which is just your opinion) are all negatives and don’t help any sort of dialogue.

This topic is discussed in the mainstream. Off top of head: BBC, Guardian, Al Jazeera, PBS, NPR, WNYC, WBEZ, WHYY, CBC, The Daily Show, The Young Turks, AJ+, NowThis, Pod Save America, Slate, Vox, Vice all have certainly covered this. Previously, Fox, Tucker Carlson (within Fox and his other affiliations), OAN, NewsMax, Daily Wire, and more on the right have also covered this and before changing their stances because of the public, were very much anti NATO.

I can see how a few listed can be claimed as non mainstream. That’s fair. Though other media listed like Pod Save America and Daily Wire have top 10 most popular podcasts. I think that can count as mainstream.

If publications like WaPo or the biggest podcast, Joe Rogan, have no discussed this yet. They will at some point to some degree.

I’m curious why you thought this fairly basic and quite common rhetoric necessitated an all caps response and hints of insanity that the mainstream cover it. I am respectfully, going with you being in your own bubble and not knowing too much about politics as my hunch and/or enjoying/preferring the status quo. However that’s just a hunch.

I don't want results of sites telling me the misinformation is going on, but I want the actual bits of misinformation for proper attribution.

There's always edge cases

For a long, long, time.

If it means saying that Russia is right, definitely not.

>The decision bans to organize or gather at assemblies “aimed at supporting, in any form or scope, the actions of the Russian Federation and/or the Republic of Belarus, which caused the introduction of the state of emergency” while this state of emergency remains in place.

https://www.baltictimes.com/lithuania_extends_state_of_emerg...

>The new legislation, which passed parliament with 71 votes in favour out of 117 cast, banned public events in support of "Russia or Belarus actions which led to this state of emergency".

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/lithuania-tightens-stat...

>Czech law enforcement warns that public approval of Russia's invasion of Ukraine could be classified as a "crime of denial, questioning, approval and justification of GENOCIDE." There are already the first two cases of detainees incriminated in this paragraph of the Criminal Code.

https://twitter.com/UKRinCZE/status/1497829641171525634

If you're looking for what specific sites are saying, you can still do that.

Search results are bias. The entire idea of a "search engine" is to bias the set of all possible data in the crawled universe to select for the information you're searching for, then sort that information by "likeliest to be what you wanted" because the interface can't just cram all the results straight into your brain.

... and the company writing the search engine is always the final arbiter of what that means in implementation.

In this specific case, DDG is announcing they are aware of some sites where the information is likely to be untrue and they're downranking it on account of it being a datasource unlikely to deliver what the user wants. That's their job, in exactly the same sense that it's their job to figure out that when I search for "hacker news" I mean this site and not the r/hackernews Reddit mirror.

If you choose to go down this path - what propaganda is OK to be relevant to most queries and who is supposed to be the judge of that?

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.

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?

(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).

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...

The moment it starts to openly prefer one kind of misinformation to other, it is basically stopping to be a general purpose web search engine (optimizing for search quality) and starts being a publisher with an agenda (optimizing in this case for a political outcome), becoming a part of the propaganda itself.

Having said that, some DDG users may be fine with this, but many aren't obviously. And I am afraid that those that are fine with it now, are likely to be fine only until the exact same process is used against them, their own interest or political/idealogical/religious beliefs in the future, which in the case of DDG is now a matter of when, because a precedent has been set with this.

> The moment it starts to openly prefer one kind of misinformation to other

When we talk about misinformation, it is not misinformation to say that Russia unjustly invaded Ukraine.

I think it's really important to clarify exactly what kind of misinformation we're talking about, because the Ukrainian narrative that Russia invaded for its own personal interests and not because of a territory dispute or to stamp out racism -- that narrative is not just another side of propaganda, it is the correct reading of the situation.

If you're talking about wartime propaganda like how many tanks have been lost, or about staged photos with prisoners, or whatever -- sure, that's propaganda that comes out of both sides. But that Russia invaded a country unjustly and is committing war crimes against it -- that is not propaganda, it's just the truth.

If you're upset that DuckDuckGo isn't treating both Russia/Ukraine's story about the cause of the war equally, then frankly, they shouldn't be treating them equally, because that's not a matter of opinion or something that needs to be tailored to the user -- regardless of who's using the engine and where they're located.

----

> Who has higher moral ground in a human conflict should be irrelevant from a standpoint of a general purpose web search engine, which DDG used to be.

There's a weird amount of conflation here between:

- moral judgements

- narrative about facts and conclusions drawn from facts

- factually incorrect claims

People can debate about the first two categories there and how search engines should respond to them, and we don't know exactly which sites DDG is looking at downranking or what their policies are for when they downrank a site. But if they are targeting the last category and if they are targeting outright lies about the cause of a conflict, then that would absolutely be something that's reasonable for a general-purpose search engine to do.

It's hard to debate about which category they're targeting if we don't know what the sites are (that in itself might be a criticism of the policy). But, still very important to understand that those three categories above are not all the same thing and not all of them should be dealt with in the same way.

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.

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.

Of course they do. By country: so .ca will rank better in Canada$and .in India by domain rank .com ranks higher than .biz

I guess on that note, I also vaguely remember that .com/.net differentiation was something that people tried in various contexts (not sure if searching was one of them) before we all figured out, "wait, this doesn't mean anything about quality other than which one you chose to buy."

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.

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?

In this particular case yes, proven by the fact that such source can only be 'Russian' by their definition.

> Well, or they're inferring that the information is factually wrong.

How would DDG do this even if they wanted? Send fact checkers to the ground?

> 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.

I agree with the last part. The problem here is they are only expressing the intent to flag disinformation from one side as factually incorrect, and do not even bother to do so for disinformation coming from the other side, thus creating bias, which is political in nature for the reasons explained above.

> 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?

Not upset at all, does my tone give out a different vibe? Sorry for that.

If you want DDG to independently verify every decision it makes via primary sources, you are going to get less useful search results. DuckDuckGo doesn't have a team of scientists to reproduce every research paper they see. Nevertheless, they can decide to intervene in situations where they are reasonably certain that a source isn't trustworthy.

Of course, people are free to disagree with them. Is the disagreement here that people think they're blocking sites that aren't misinformation? That's difficult to debate given that we don't know the list of sites, but my personal priors are that the sites probably aren't the victims of smear-campaigns, they probably are peddling deliberate misinformation. Hard to debate one way or another if we don't know the list; but once again, arguing that DuckDuckGo is wrong about whether these sources are trustworthy is not the same as saying that they shouldn't be able to downrank a bad news source without first forming their own team of investigative journalists.

----

> I agree. The problem here is they are only flagging disinformation from one side as factually incorrect, and do not even bother to do so for disinformation coming from the other side, thus creating bias, which is political in nature for the reasons explained above.

So, there's two things here:

First, yes, search engines have bias for the same reason that all ranking systems have bias. Remember that DuckDuckGo is literally in the business of ranking certain sites above other sites. There is no one in the world and no algorithm that is capable of ranking information without incorporating some degree of worldview into that decision about how rankings should work. This bias is why we use search engines, and it's why diversity in search engines would be a good thing. We want sorting systems to have opinions about how information should be sorted.

This is still very difficult to talk about when the word "political" is being used in such a broad sense. Do you mean political in the sense that all editorial decisions are political by nature because they either reinforce or question a status quo? Or do you mean political in a more narrow way -- that applying more strict standards to a subgroup of sources is the thing that makes this political? If you mean "political" in a broad sense, then sure, I agree, but also there's no such thing as a web search engine that is apolitical in that broad sense and I question whether it's possible to build one that is apolitical without also being completely useless for most users. If you mean political in the second sense, that there is a narrow category of political topics and the lack of fairness is the thing that makes it political... again, I just don't understand how you square that with the regular filtering that search engines do all the time.

When Google Ads pay special attention to ads for lockpickers because it's a popular spam category of ad, but they don't pay special attention to other ads to the same degree, is that suddenly political?

Second issue I have here, if the problem is a lack of flagging misinformation in other contexts, why would the answer not be more rigorous flagging of that misinformation? Why would the answer necessarily be that DuckDuckGo results should be a free-for-all whenever someone searches for the word Ukraine? There's a big jump here from, "I think they're not doing a thorough enough job and I think they're taking sides in a conflict" to "they shouldn't be even trying to do this at all".

There are some services where that viewpoint makes sense, but I don't see how DDG is one of them. I personally have argued that companies like Cloudflare fundamentally shouldn't be in the business of releasing content filters at all. I personally have argued that TLDs shouldn't be involved in censorship. I have personally argued that ISPs should not be allowed to filter content that is not illegal. Important difference, none of those are companies whose primary service is sorting content, none of them are companies that we go to with the explicit request for them to give us information based on what they think is relevant and accurate.

How do you make the jump from disapproval of DDG's standard for misinformation and how it's applied to the idea that they shouldn't be involved in filtering of misinformation at all?

----

TLDR, I still don't really understand why editorial decisions about political content is a slippery slope, but abandoning editorial decisions based on a word ("political") that doesn't seem particularly rigorously defined isn't also a slippery slope.

It is quite easy to disapprove their current standard on record because according to it, misinformation can be coming from a "Russian" source only and we all know there is much more misinformation in the world than that. Can we agree on this?

I am not saying that a search engine shouldn't be involved in filtering of misinformation. On the contrary, I think that DDG (and any other search engine) should absolutely be in the business of filtering all misinformation they can. Key here is "all".

But by being selective, and in this case based on a particular political view (and I use the word political in the context of world politics), introduces a bias which may negatively affect its users, without any particular benefit.

Makes sense?

I'll offer a weak note in their defense that I suspect part of the reason they don't is specifically to avoid sliding down a slippery slope and breaking this balance between neutrality and editorial decisions about content. I suspect that DuckDuckGo would say that there is a volume and kind of misinformation happening here that they are willing to address, but that applying the standards too broadly would result in them making decisions in other contexts where they feel less confident and in pushing their editorial line too far.

However, I don't think it's unreasonable at all to disagree with them on that assessment, and I think it's extremely reasonable to ask why DuckDuckGo feels safer about downranking certain kinds of misinformation and feels nervous about taking stances about other misinformation.

My hope is that if it's somehow possible for anything positive at all to come out of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, it's in part that people become more conscientious and critical about other conflicts (and narratives about conflicts) that we tend to take for granted or ignore.

It may look like that on a first glance, but assuming even spread of 100M DDG users, those users from Russia, China, India, Indonesia, Middle east may be more sensitive to other kind (in this case western media) of misinformation.

Since this is easily half of the world population I would argue that stance they took could also be easily seen as an 'extremely unreasonable' at the same time.

> When we talk about misinformation, it is not misinformation to say that Russia unjustly invaded Ukraine.

Wording is a funny thing.

And you're asking for an enemy state to be allowed to do that warfare, against Ukraine, Europe, the US, unhindered.

This is not comparable to a company tricking people in buying more of their pointless stuff.

> but of political bias nature

No, what you're saying, would help a dictator that attacks another country.

(I say that as a former neocon too.)

Is it censorship for them to downrank flat-earth content when you are trying to learn about how to chart a flight? Flat-earthers certainly have a lot of ideas about how charting a course on a flat earth works but that doesn't mean it's helpful to a reasonable person.

At least in their case they truly believe it, with disinformation the entire goal is to exploit DDGs users to pretty much everyone's detriment. Of course if I search for "RT ukrainian conflict" RT should show up, but do you really want your search engine to default to providing results from someone with a very clear agenda and a history of abusing their influence to carry out that agenda?

Of course its possible that the net is too wide, but I find it weird that there is a slippery slope censorship argument going on when search engines have been trying to serve authentic results and beat out inauthentic ones for 20+ years.

Have you met the US media?

If you don't look at this massive coordinated effort and smell something fishy, I just don't know what to say.

Can you explain how this is incontrovertibly different than other foreign war entanglements from the past few decades?

Very odd reply.

Is it the "western nation" part that makes this different?

That said, sometimes it actually is coordination. Just look at the JournoList scandal.

Journalists have always talked to each other. The fact that we have an auditable mailing list of one instance of it just tells us something we already know.

Yes, that sounds like journalists just "talking to each other."

Oh course, they forgot that everything on a mailing list is definitionally on-the-record.

No, they were coordinating messaging to get the results they wanted. That's the scandal, because they were simultaneously presenting themselves as Objective Journalists.

Unfortunately, the alternatives to mainstream media (Q-idiots, Zero Hedge, Info Wars, random dude with an opinionated blog, some pot comedian's podcast, viral memes on facebook, etc), tend to be even worse. And for every time they may occasionally be right about something, there's another dozen times when they are laughably, pants-on-head wrong.

There's no easy solution to being informed... That you can just passively consume on your smartphone.

The alternative to one source of dubious information is not another source of dubious information. The alternative is to have access to all sorts of information, and piece together what you think is true, using your own critical thinking skills and ability to sniff out BS.

That used to be the Internet. It is not the Internet anymore, since the Internet has, for the first time I can think of, decided that This One Particular Country is uniquely bad, for Reasons, and should therefore be unpersoned; and also has the ability to squelch any dissent because so much of the Internet has become siloed in big corporations. It's really weird, and I find it suspicious.

In general, however, truthful and accurate information is more valuable for learning about a topic. I’m not going to rely on getting that from a regime that imprisons people for sharing data and analyses that challenge the regime’s narrative. It’s inherently more untrustworthy than a society that protects free press.

When these regimes target their media for foreign audiences like you and me, it’s in their best interest to mask the origin of that content. Becoming more informed becomes harder when this context is unavailable to us.

Ranking those sources lower specifically improves the end product and results in a better informed user.

There is some consolidation happening (mostly around the fact that a lot of the companies we regularly use are "Western" and most of the governments of the West have imposed sanctions on Russia that those companies have to comply with), but it's also a that the meme has taken hold that (a) Russia deserves to be opposed and (b) sanctions and cutting-off are an effective way to oppose them.

This strategy is vulnerable to supply-chain attacks on your information sources... which is exactly what Russian information warfare carries out.

The credibility of American and European "mainstream media" is oft-maligned but rarely actually demonstrated to be suspect at a large scale in the news departments. Editorial choices of what to cover and when are the most common complaint, which is a far cry from astroturfing and falsehoods made out of whole cloth that Russian sources typically engage in.

There is no single strategy, there is no silver bullet. I certainly didn't intend to imply that there was. One can only make their best effort. Any strategy is going to have flaws.

>which is a far cry from astroturfing and falsehoods made out of whole cloth that Russian sources typically engage in

American mass media has historically done exactly those things. There never was a time where The News was trustworthy, unbiased, and disinterested in politics. This continues today. You can look around the Internet--at least for now--and find where people have compiled examples of mainstream American news flat-out staging a scene for the TV to give an impression that is not true, such as a long-distance zoomed in shot of a crowd that makes the few dozen protesters seem like they fill a large area.

I wouldn't downplay the editorial decisions that you mention either. That is a hugely powerful lever of control. Yanking RT or whoever from search results is exactly that, only this time it is exercised by corporate tech companies.

Finally, one can always find a reason why this thing is worse than this other thing, and one is therefore justified in doing whatever it is one wanted to do anyway. This line of argumentation rarely impresses me.

The costs of letting disinformation flow freely are far greater than the costs of downranking sources known for disinformation. One only need look at the antivax movement to confirm this.

> Finally, one can always find a reason why this thing is worse than this other thing, and one is therefore justified in doing whatever it is one wanted to do anyway. This line of argumentation rarely impresses me.

Good thing the responsible parties have no interest in or duty regarding impressing you, then. Whatabouters don't impress me, personally.

As I said, "one can always find a reason why this thing is worse than this other thing, and one is therefore justified in doing whatever it is one wanted to do anyway." Simply slap a "disinformation" label on it.

I hope you are similarly motivated by these airy principles when the next government employs these same tactics to do things you do not agree with, but I rather suspect you will not be.

Mainstream sources keep talking about a particular bill and then you read, "hey, that's a misrepresentation, here's the text of the bill and it doesn't say that." They link to the text on the government website and it turns out, they're right. The bill doesn't say that.

Then the same guy starts talking about vaccines and you have to go somewhere else to see the debunk of that.

6 companies dominate the media [1] which together make up at least 90% of all media [2]. Note that this isn't limited to just news.

[1] https://www.fool.com/investing/stock-market/market-sectors/c...

[2] https://tacomacc.libguides.com/c.php?g=599051&p=4586162

Also, you might find this video either amusing or alarming

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fHfgU8oMSo

I know it's rare nowadays, but sometimes, gasp, large groups of people across organizations and industries can coordinate for a mutually beneficial and morally virtuous cause. At this point, I'm sure someone could start another massive genocide with HD livestreams of the gas chambers and some people would still be like "hmmm, this coordinated effort to stop Hitler 2.0 sure seems fishy".

I've lost all hope.

This is a very strange strawman. The implicit assumptions in this question are:

- That DuckDuckGo 'defaulted' to RT or to some other Russian media, which is hardly the case. It is the task of a search engine to infer, from its users' behaviour, which resources they find the most useful in providing answers to given queries.

- That other sources do not have a clear agenda :-)

I've not heard this before. So I need to know the wages of the workers, what the CEO had for breakfast, the favorite color of all employees, the inventory and sales, etc for every single company in order for it to be a free market?

I'm not arguing that knowing these things would be bad but actually curious of the boundaries you would draw when you say "transparency" such that it would encompass the exact algorithms used in a privately-owned search engine.

What the hotdog vendor dreamed of last night doesn't inform my buying decision like the fact that it fell on the floor earlier would.

This is true for all search engines because it's literally impossible to return even half decent results if everyone knows your algorithm. It'll just be pages and pages of SEO nonsense. If you believed for even a second that search engines can exist without curating you haven't been thinking very hard. Not curating would only ensure that you see nothing but propaganda.

A search engine based on popularity is the basis of google 2004.

What no one has done is a search engine where you can select who's version of what's popular to use. What do people in my area.. My age group.. My shared interest visit when they search 'eye blush'

Please ensure you're following the HN Guidelines[1] when leaving replies :^)

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"Trust" is usually earned. On what basis have "people" earned your trust?

Both sides in the conflict spread disinformation. DDG desides to downrank only results related to disinformation from one side. This makes it a decision based on a political bias and not search quality bias (which would cause all disinformation to be downranked - which is OK and actually a desireable thing in a search engine). By not downranking disinformation from the other side, which is equally bad content, this steps out of the scope of what a search engine should be interested in doing.

Secondly, how in the world would DDG have the resources or capabilities to determine what is disinformation in the first place? Much larger companies like Facebook failed at this. It is generally considered that the 'fog of war' is a real thing and there is no single source of news on this planet that did not spread some disinformation at some point. DDG would probably have to downrank half of the sites in its results, and probably every site that ever published any information about this conflict, if they were to be consistent. Something like this is basically unenforcable from an engineering/algorithmic standpoint.

So basically from a business perspective, this has to be a bet that the publicity from this act would net them more users than they started with in the markets they care about.

One of them does not have free press and kill journalists. Both cases are not even remotely comparable.

But it is specifically not a question about who the good guy is. This is about hiding certain information.

You can change entire elections this way, by controlling what propaganda is ok and what isn't. But make no mistake, its actually all propaganda.

EDIT: The rest of the quote is “On Google, you get results tailored to what they think you’re likely to click on, based on the data profile they’ve built on you over time.”

> As a result, users become separated from information that disagrees with their viewpoints, effectively isolating them in their own cultural or ideological bubbles. The choices made by these algorithms are not transparent.

I don't think it's unfounded criticism.

One problem is how arbitrary the categorization of "disinformation" can be. Once you go down the path, it can also create a scenario where you tacitly approve the things you don't decide to censor/downrank. While I can argue both sides, it simply doesn't come without trade-offs.

A hyper-partisan search engine that only showed results that favor one viewpoint would be bad, but it wouldn't be a filter bubble.

Or rather, "it's okay since it's not an algorithm doing it" doesn't wave away the concerns very effectively.

False facts are valuable in a search only as if tagged as debunked as false in the same page.

Personally, I use DDG because it's useful. As long as the new ranking makes them more useful, more power to them. If they do it wrong, I'll start looking for some replacement.

If Google did that (as they do) it would require some discussion about censorship and monopolies, but yeah, there's nothing wrong with DDG doing it.

That's assuming there's only one platform. When users can choose other search engines (or social media sites, video platforms, etc) then it absolutely creates a filter bubble when each platform injects its own bias into its content. No algorithm is perfect but I'd generally prefer my search results without deliberate bias.

Plus you'd have to be knee deep in the koolaid to think that only russian sources are propaganda. It just ao happens they are obviously on the "other side" today but let's not pretend that US and Ukranian sources aren't coming with their own healthy dose of spin.

For example, all the recent reports of civilian infrastructure being bombed are most certainly leaving out that these buildings were being used by Ukranian forces, much like reports of Israel targeting civilian buildings. That doesn't justify the russian actions since putin is fighting an unjust war of aggression, but that important context is an example of spin that is all over the "approved" sources of information.

The fundamental feature of a filter bubble is that you can not escape it. If all it takes is looking at another site, it's not it.

Anyway, I prefer my search results devoid of known falsehoods. I don't believe it at all that DDG can achieve this, but if there's a loud known source of that can be cut without false positives, I do prefer that it's cut. Unfortunately, verifying the mainstream news isn't such an easy task, so that DDG will become both more reliable and more biased at the same time. Personally, I don't care much for the bias. I care about the reliability.

(And yes, all of your conclusions are probably true.)

You can still find these sites—they come up first if you look for them directly, they're just treated as the low quality information than they are.

Your comment is actually an amazing example of why we should absolutely avoid media censorship (like the EU is doing right now); it seems like the people who are usually the most vocally pushing for it are also, not coincidentally, those who are also the most likely to be completely oblivious to propaganda even when it's right in front of them. Yet also think that they are impervious to it.

They generally do not consider it unbiased at all and many would call it false propaganda, especially if they are Irish or Scottish.

If there were an option to pay the license fee from the US, I would.

I can’t decide your generalizations are pretty ignorant (at best parroting the Daily Mail and friends) or malevolent.

Hyperbolic claim, so I will ignore it.

>it is generally more free of bias than any other available source, especially when covering international matters.

I disagree, especially when the British have an interest in the outcome of an international situation.

1. Who will decide what is truth or not. 2. Who will be arbiter

With this decision, they join the club with Google and the rest.

One of the main goals of the current Russian propaganda push in the US is to get people to lose confidence in reliable news outlets. They want us to believe that our best news outlets are equivalent to their basement troll farms that just fabricate stories day in and out.

The two are not the same.

Giving equal per story weight to misinformation spammers is equivalent to letting those spammers censor the rest of the media. Is that really what you want duck duck go and other western sites to do?

If people lost trust on Western medias, it's not because of Russians, it's because we are constantly producing propaganda as well. It's just different.

They're also foreign owned, and promote policies that would prevent people from voting, allow counts to be ignored.

Since they're Australian, they're not even geographically "western".

Fox News, and stylized in all caps, is an American multinational conservative cable news television channel based in New York City.[2][3][4] It is owned by Fox News Media, which itself is owned by the Fox Corporation.[5]

Fox Corporation (stylized in all-caps as FOX Corporation)[5] is a publicly traded American mass media company operated and controlled by media mogul Rupert Murdoch and headquartered at 1211 Avenue of the Americas in New York City. Incorporated in Delaware, it was formed in 2019 as a result of the acquisition of 21st Century Fox by The Walt Disney Company

-- We Australians call it an American company, you can't put this one on us!

The only difference between the US and Russia is the the US is a lot more subtle when it comes to generating propaganda.

If western news outlets focused a little more on actually being reliable and objective maybe people wouldnt lose confidence.

I hardly think Russian propaganda is required for people to do this.

Also, organizations that still have journalists on staff, and win awards such as the Pulitzer Prize are a good bet.

Edit: https://www.pulitzer.org/prize-winners-by-year/2021

> “[W]hen you search, you expect unbiased results, but that’s not what you get on Google,” Gabriel Weinberg, founder of DuckDuckGo, a privacy-focused search engine, writes on Quora. “On Google, you get results tailored to what they think you’re likely to click on, based on the data profile they’ve built on you over time.”

"Unbiased" is a bad word to use, but what they were getting at is that Google tailors search results per-person based on a data profile. I don't see how anyone even at the time thought that this meant that DuckDuckGo was not ranking sites, that's what a search engine does.

I genuinely don't understand the controversy at all about this. "Who determines what is misinformation" is an argument for search engine diversity, not for destroying the entire concept of a search engine. Of course DuckDuckGo downranks and upranks sites.

The real controversy here is why after all of these years they still haven't gotten around to downranking W3Schools.

They don't downrank w3schools because something will just replace it. ;)

We aren't talking about good results versus bad results here surely? When did bias come into it? Merely falsehoods versus truths? Or have we got to the point where no one actually believes in such anymore and it depends on your political opinion on whether something is true or false?

Fact or fiction. Let your political direction decide.

Surely removing fictious results should be a bonus for everyone?

I give up. World has gone pure stone mad.

Nothing more, nothing less. To think there's some objective "unbiased" search result is naive.