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DuckDuckGo “down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation”

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Re: DuckDuckGo “down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation”

#11

Post by diego_moita »

Good! One more reason for me to remain a DDG user. This is the behaviour of responsible and accountable adults.

"Censoring" is a word very badly understood and prone to manipulation.

There are a lot of circumstances where suppression of information/opinion is justified: protecting intellectual property and copyrights, blocking doxing, prevent haters from doing harm against others, protection of military secrets or people in danger, etc.

In case someone hasn't noticed, there is a war going on in Europe. That is a circumstance where some of these cases apply.

Also, freedom of speech is a principle applied on the relation of people with the state, an issue for public law. This is about a private enterprise and its relations with its users, subject to the regulation of private law.

If this sounds just like "legalese" to you consider this: a newspaper has the right to select and editorialize the news it publishes, a bookseller has the right to choose what books to sell, a movie theatre or a movie producer also has rights to choose what to exhibit or produce. The same principle applies to what dang does here at HN.

So why shouldn't DDG have the right to choose what search results to display?

Re: DuckDuckGo “down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation”

#15

Post by choward »

> DuckDuckGo's mission is to make simple privacy protection accessible to all.

The main job of a search engine is to give me results relevant to what I'm searching for. Privacy is obviously a nice feature but if the results suck, I'm not going to use your search engine so privacy doesn't matter.

Who are they to decide what is "disinformation". How do they know? I want to see all sides of a story and come to my own conclusions. I don't need big tech babysitting me.

Re: DuckDuckGo “down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation”

#16

Post by choward »

diego_moita wrote: post #11

Good! One more reason for me to remain a DDG user. This is the behaviour of responsible and accountable adults. "Censoring" is a word very badly understood and prone to manipulation. There are a lot of circumstances where suppression of information/opinion is justified: protecting intellectual property and copyrights, blocking doxing, prevent haters from doing harm against others, protection of military secrets or pe…

> In case someone hasn't noticed, there is a war going on in Europe. That is a circumstance where some of these cases apply.

There's a saying: "Truth is the first casualty in war." The last thing I want during a war is censorship. Why should I magically start trusting the government and media now?

> If this sounds just like "legalese" to you consider this: a newspaper has the right to select and editorialize the news it publishes, a bookseller has the right to choose what books to sell, a movie theatre or a movie producer also has rights to choose what to exhibit or produce. The same principle applies to what dang does here at HN. > > So why shouldn't DDG have the right to choose what search results to display?

DuckDuckGo isn't a publisher. They are a search engine. And nobody is claiming that they don't have the right to do what they are doing. But by doing so they are just like the search engines everyone is trying to escape from. Sure, you might get privacy but who cares if the results are manipulated?

Re: DuckDuckGo “down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation”

#17

Post by ricardo81 »

diego_moita wrote: post #11

Good! One more reason for me to remain a DDG user. This is the behaviour of responsible and accountable adults. "Censoring" is a word very badly understood and prone to manipulation. There are a lot of circumstances where suppression of information/opinion is justified: protecting intellectual property and copyrights, blocking doxing, prevent haters from doing harm against others, protection of military secrets or pe…

I don't get the comparison with newspapers, maybe 40 years ago that was one of the limited ways of information discovery but we've had the web since then. People are free to discover the world's information and given the saturation of that information, differing points of view on it. However, with two dominant search engines (Google and Bing/DuckDuckGo/Yahoo) there is little diversity and so censorship has more impact, at least in web discovery and navigation.

Re: DuckDuckGo “down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation”

#18

Post by hnuser847 »

diego_moita wrote: post #11

Good! One more reason for me to remain a DDG user. This is the behaviour of responsible and accountable adults. "Censoring" is a word very badly understood and prone to manipulation. There are a lot of circumstances where suppression of information/opinion is justified: protecting intellectual property and copyrights, blocking doxing, prevent haters from doing harm against others, protection of military secrets or pe…

> In case someone hasn't noticed, there is a war going on in Europe. That is a circumstance where some of these cases apply.

Indeed, there's a war going on and there's a tremendous amount of propaganda being circulated from both sides. The question is, why is DDG okay with amplifying Ukranian/NATO propaganda and not Russian propaganda? Is it because NATO is the "good" guy and Russia is the "bad" guy?

When the US invaded Iraq in 2003, they did so on completely fabricated pretenses. The amount of death and destruction the US inflicted on the people of Iraq was horrifying. If DDG had existed back then, which side should they have taken? The side of the violent invaders (the "good" guys) or the side of the Iraqis (the "bad" guys)?

> So why shouldn't DDG have the right to choose what search results to display?

Of course they have the right to choose whatever they want, however this move seems antithetical to their original mission. If I wanted US-centric state-approved search results, I could just use Google.

Re: DuckDuckGo “down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation”

#19

Post by snowman-yelling »

uejfiweun wrote: post #3

I like DDG, but honestly, this is a really bad move. It is already harder for me to find certain sites in the rankings. I mean look at this, even searching for "drudge" doesn't even bring up a link to Drudge Report: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=drudge&t=h_&ia=web I liked DDG because it respected the user. Limiting what I can see in order to make sure I don't see "Russian disinformation" seems to me like the exact opposi…

Drudge was literally the first link in my results. Haha.

Re: DuckDuckGo “down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation”

#20

Post by mrjangles »

Seriously what the f*ck makes Gabriel Weinberg think that myself, or anyone else, gives a damn about his personal opinion on what I should and should not be reading. The arrogance of these people is astounding.

Also, absolutely zero of the standard base of Duck Duck Go users are the kind of people who don't understand what a Russian state controlled news site is, and why one would have to be careful reading it. Those people may well exist, but they would be using Google. This move makes their disdain for their users obvious.

There is now no reason to be using Duck Duck Go over startpage.com, which also doesn't track you, but gives you the results straight from google, which are always much better than duck duck go.

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