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DuckDuckGo “down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation”
31–40 of 865 posts
Re: DuckDuckGo “down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation”
#32> 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 co…
Is this materially different from filtering other abuse like SEO spam? Would you choose to keep spam in your results to reach your own conclusion?
Re: DuckDuckGo “down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation”
#33Lot of hot takes and hostility in these comments, which is honestly kinda surprising.
If your reaction to this news is negative, ask yourself, should DuckDuckGo downrank SEO spam? Then ask yourself how disinformation written to "go viral" on social media and in search results is different from SEO spam.
Re: DuckDuckGo “down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation”
#34Good! 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…
You're not wrong that they absolutely have the right to choose what results to display. Just like Twitter has the right to choose what content appears on their platform, and same with YouTube, etc. But my opposition is not from a legal standpoint, it is from a moral standpoint. I just think censorship and cancellation is wrong and immoral, even if it is legally allowed. I think it is immoral for some business executi…
If you think censorship is wrong then it follows that you would think that the Russian state is wrong given that they are going as far as denying this is even a war, and actively censoring those that call it one. Are you saying that you're still keen for them to be allowed to do so?
Re: DuckDuckGo “down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation”
#35I guess this did not age well: “[W]hen you search, you expect unbiased results, but that’s not what you get on Google,” @matthewde_silva quotes @yegg https://twitter.com/DuckDuckGo/status/1114524914227253249 Also, they probably do not realize that they will have to start with Twitter if to be consistent.
What does down-ranking disinformation sites globally have to do with complaining about Google customizing results based on its profile of you? EDIT: The rest of the quote is “On Google, you get results tailored to what they think you’re likely to click on, based on the data profile they’ve built on you over time.”
And in this specific case, it feels more like quality control of state-sponsored spam.
You can still find these sites—they come up first if you look for them directly, they're just treated as the low quality information than they are.
Re: DuckDuckGo “down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation”
#36Yegg followed up with an argument about relevancy of results:
"Search engines by definition try to put more relevant content higher and less relevant content lower -- that's not censorship, it's search ranking relevancy." – https://twitter.com/yegg/status/1501734648417865731
The other premise is that Russian disinformation is irrelevant by virtue of being disinformation – that a user of DDG wouldn't want to be manipulated if he somehow knew in advance that this would be the effect on him. Accepting that arguendo, what about the user explicitly looking for what Russia has to say? I asked Yegg if appending "russian perspective" would give Russian perspectives. I don't expect a reply but it seems clear to me that down-ranking sites is too blunt a tool to allow for this.
Re: DuckDuckGo “down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation”
#37Good! 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 impac…
The internet is probably the biggest threat democracy has ever faced. I am ok with your romantic point of view of the informed masses but it’s a fallacy that in the end will cost us all our future. Because these people live and engage in extreme bubbles they get sucked into no matter if it’s left or right. I can only urge everyone who is for total tolerance to read K. Poppers the “Open Society and it’s Enemies” quite fitting from 1945.
Re: DuckDuckGo “down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation”
#38I guess this did not age well: “[W]hen you search, you expect unbiased results, but that’s not what you get on Google,” @matthewde_silva quotes @yegg https://twitter.com/DuckDuckGo/status/1114524914227253249 Also, they probably do not realize that they will have to start with Twitter if to be consistent.
What does down-ranking disinformation sites globally have to do with complaining about Google customizing results based on its profile of you? EDIT: The rest of the quote is “On Google, you get results tailored to what they think you’re likely to click on, based on the data profile they’ve built on you over time.”
Downranking "disinformation" could be seen as creating the sort of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_bubble that Weinberg often denigrates.
> As a result, users become separated from information that disagrees with their viewpoints, effectively isolating them in their own cultural or ideological bubbles. The choices made by these algorithms are not transparent.
I don't think it's unfounded criticism.
One problem is how arbitrary the categorization of "disinformation" can be. Once you go down the path, it can also create a scenario where you tacitly approve the things you don't decide to censor/downrank. While I can argue both sides, it simply doesn't come without trade-offs.
Re: DuckDuckGo “down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation”
#39> 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 co…
> Who are they to decide what is "disinformation". How do they know?
Making decisions about which information to rank highly vs. lowly is, you know, kind of the definition of a search engine.
Re: DuckDuckGo “down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation”
#40I want to use a search engine that puts all its effort into down-ranking sites that I'm not searching for