How do you think search engines detect manipulation, down, fraudulent content, etc, if not by judging the content? Content is all a search engine sees.

An article about a Nigerian prince who needs money is likely to be a scam. An article about how Ukraine is really just a rebellious Russian province is likely to be state-sponsored propaganda.

>manipulation

This seems to be the case being argued here

>explicitly illegal content

Illegal according to who?

>fraudulent content

Fraudulent according to who?

These things you name are an editorial decision and are not unbiased

Does bad-faith propaganda not qualify as fraudulent content?

So no more NYT?

yes they should obviously be filtering out or downranking manipulated and fraudulent propaganda content. these policies would have existed before the invasion happened so there would be no reason to say that you are going to be downranking russian information unless you are planning on adding additional filtering and manipulation to the ranking on top of what you would normally do to content. they should be filtering all content neutrally and equally, not filtering russian content more because the owner wants to inject politics into their algorithm.