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.
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.
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.
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"!