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
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 :^)
"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.
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.