101–110 of 865 posts
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Exactly. If I'm searching for Russian propaganda, I should see Russian propaganda in my search results. If I'm searching for good bicycle reviews, I should see good bicycle reviews.
What should be shown if you search for „why did russia invade ukraine“?
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 inva…
As a child I was brainwashed by US propaganda living on the western side of the Iron Curtain. The 'home of the brave and land of the free'. How lo g it took me to remove this naive Hollywood image of our friend the US from my mind.
It took many long evenings of talking to actual people from the US while in university to learn more about the individual truths and lives instead of my rose tinted image.
To me personally for many years now the US were the biggest danger to peace on this planet. Now - taking a page from their playbook their old arch enemy is rearing its head and using the frigging same arguments the US used back in Iraq to sow war on European soil.
I am already only "allowed" (I know I can access other sources - it just isn't easy nor mainstream compatible) to watch western news.
Russian propaganda is more or less banned from German viewers (with RT and others being banned). I am not allowed to try to glimpse the way Putin wants to be seen internally.
And now - after Bing and Google - DDG follows suit and declares me too naive to be able to deal with Russian propaganda while still listing all the Western BS that should fill my head instead. Because in the end most 'news' currently is nothing but propaganda. Most news have an agenda.
There is nearly no good signal. Nearly only noise.
But few of the best sources to understand the mindset of the power elite in Russia I read in the last months were Russian sources read with the knowledge of the intended reason of publication. Aka reading it as the propaganda it is.
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Drudge was literally the first link in my results. Haha.
Weird. Maybe I got unlucky with some experiment rollout. My top links are Drudge Retort (some stupid parody), the link to the Drudge app on iPhone, and the dictionary definition for "drudge". Nowhere on the page is there an actual link to the site for me.
Searching for "drudge report" brings up drudgereport.com.
Also, after having searched for both "drudge" and "drudge report" several times in a row, drudgereport.com is the top result for both searches.
I want to use a search engine that puts all its effort into down-ranking sites that I'm not searching for
I want one which doesn't decide this for me, no-matter how "good for me" it may be, and relies exclusively on my search query to decide what is most relevant. If you really want to flag disinformation, I'd be fine with some sort percentage reliability value or something along those lines, right next to the result. Preferably something that I can also order results by. Totally happy with a 'caveat emptor' clause regar…
Disinformation doesn't just try to present an alternative view, it also tries to drown out other viewpoints. I don't think it's possible to accurately and neutrally present search results when bad actors try to subvert rankings.
I think propaganda can be interesting, I don't think it should be banned. But penalizing it seems fair to me. I don't want other searches to get flooded with clickbait.
I 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.
"unbiased" doesn't mean "unfiltered". For example, I don't want spam or malware in my search results. Search results should return good information that is relevant to your query, and filter out anything that is not that.
I don't want results of sites telling me the misinformation is going on, but I want the actual bits of misinformation for proper attribution.
There's always edge cases
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…
This is a weird stance to take about a search engine which is "tell me what to read as a service." Like you're literally using them to surface the wheat from the chaff. The algorithm that ranks results is already biased as hell and sometimes it's going to get it wrong. Google surfacing lots of stackoverflow spam sites isn't "unbiased" it's junk and manual correction is totally fine.
If users don't like the change in the search engine algorithm (for whatever reason), they'll stop using the search engine. It's not a weird stance to take.
At the very least this HN submission is surfacing search engine competitors like Startpage, Brave, and Kagi.
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Doesn't seem incompatible. I assume most people searching for general news about Ukraine are not seeking for Russian state media's take on it.
I've watched US propaganda from WW2, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, etc. I don't trust the US government or their news agencies anymore than any other propaganda. They'll pick the facts that support their side and mix in lies without a second thought. There are three truths in war: My side, their side, and the truth. If they feel compelled to do something, poison the well by marking sites as suspected Russian propaganda. Othe…
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> Besides, what's so bad about access to "disinformation"? This is an excellent point that doesn’t get as much discussion as it deserves. Censorship of misinformation seems to be rooted in the idea that the masses cannot/should not have the freedom to think and discuss information freely. Also, there is a great deal of valuable insight which can be gained by analyzing a country’s propaganda.
There is great value in analyzing propaganda if you know it's propaganda. The danger comes in the fact that the majority of people can't distinguish actual reporting from disinformation. That's why it gets down-ranked.