I mean, do you feel that Fox and OAN deserve the same "reputation score" as Nature? If so, why?

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...

I think you're under-estimating the quantity of articles Nature and associated journals publish that aren't scientific, or are outright wrong, just because they flatter the preconceptions of their readers. There's even a cute saying in science, "Just because it's published in Nature, doesn't mean it's wrong".

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!

>As for your legal point, that doesn't mean much. Lawyers try any argument that might work.

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.

It wasn't illegal, was it? Fox won that court case, because they stated that Tucker Carlson is commentary and not factual news reporting. Which is exactly what his show is, and the judge agreed.

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.

> Just because it's published in Nature, doesn't mean it's wrong

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.

I understand the philosophy of science just fine. The problem with Nature articles is not that they are mostly right but a little bit wrong around the edges in ways other scientists will soon refine. The problem is they are often no better than science fiction. They are wrong, wrong at their core, the authors and editors know they are wrong and nobody cares because the conclusions are ideologically useful. It's not specific to Nature of course. Science as a whole has a massive problem with such papers. Way too many researchers/academics like to blow this problem off as just the normal scientific process - it's not.

You have rediscovered why it is difficult to make a search engine. This is a problem that applies to all search results, not just politically charged content: human judgement is always required to write a search algorithm.

So where does that leave us? Everything is biased? What does that mean when applied to duckduckgo's tweet from 2019? It's just a hollow slogan? I'm not sure that changes the conclusion much. The first impression I got from reading the comment was that the tweet from 2019 was a hollow PR message that they don't stand behind.

> So where does that leave us? Everything is biased?

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...

> So where does that leave us? Everything is biased?

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.

You should check out Algorithms of Oppression, a very good book about the exact topic you’re asking questions about.

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/

No - they are explicitly adding bias here. They are coding it into their algorithm.

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

But this is something new. Its overt, explicit.

> they are explicitly adding bias here.

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.

There is nothing about this that is close to new. Everyone who runs a real search engine on the public internet has a need to explicitly code in edge-cases from time to time.

If I search cure for cancer the pro bleach crowed will be annoyed that bleach doesn't comes up before chemotherapy. I'm assuming you haven't actually looked at the disinformation that Russian propagandists are putting out. They aren't just saying "Russia is justified in ensuring the independence of areas with people who consider themselves traditionally Soviets" this is "Ukraine is bombing itself to make Russia look bad".

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.

> "Russian disinformation"

Which is spam.