Re:DuckDuckGo “down-rank sites associated with Russian disin...
by zuminator on Friday March 11, 2022 @02:40PM
(#30645032)
Good points, honestly. I'll just add that I don't think down-ranking amounts to censorship, rather it seems a good compromise between that and Babel, in that a casual low-information browser won't see known misinformation as a top result, but a more engaged reader can still locate it down the page if they wish.
Re:DuckDuckGo “down-rank sites associated with Russian disin...
by CRConrad on Monday March 14, 2022 @05:06AM
(#30670065)
> I don't disagree with most of what you said, but I don't think that's a justification for censorship.
> 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.
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.