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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”

#241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any links to this? I would love to watch some old videos from that time.

Not videos, but these two articles played a formative role in my worldview (related to Iraq): WaPo: "Irrefutable" : https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/2003/02/06/i... NYTimes: "Irrefutable and Undeniable" : https://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/06/opinion/irrefutable-and-u... I find it extremely interesting to occasionally reread those knowing what we know now. And nothing has changed, except for now there is…

Interesting, seems like the Russian „Firehose of Falsehoods“ model seemed to work pretty well on a sizeable demographic of even HN to make them distrust anything:

https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE198.html

I‘m not saying I‘m blindly following either sides‘ narrative, but to me there is a clear trustworthyness hierarchy between the narrative of a society where I can still freely read, discuss and criticize these obvious pieces of misinformation (while they stay on the record!) and a society that changes its own narrative every other day and where just mentioning the word „war“ can lock me up in jail for 15 years by now.

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

#242
post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Good information" is very subjective. Some people think Fox News information is good, others think it's all lies. Some people think Wikipedia is the closest thing to Word of God that we can get, others think it's a bunch of kids with too much free time on their hands writing about things they have no idea about. Some people think the US government is trustworthy, others think it lied so many times only an idiot can…

"Good information", almost synonymous with "truth", is not subjective. It is objective, observable fact. The fact that is a lot of disagreement, propaganda, and lies concerning that truth does not render it subjective.

> "Good information", almost synonymous with "truth"

Truth gets you about 1% of the way towards returning "good information". What are the ideal search results for "orange"?

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

#243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This word keeps coming in this comments section: "spam." Spam was never mentioned in the Tweet, the source of this discussion. In fact no one in the comments section is talking about spam either, unless its a pathetic debunking attempt. They are talking about genuine results being down-ranked based on their ideological, even morally unscrupulous content, and why that is harmful to intelligent people who don't need th…

Is propaganda a "genuine result"? Yeah yeah, one person's truth is another person's propaganda and sometimes the lines are blurry. But cases like RT are pretty clear cut. Sometimes people actually do lie, and those lies are verifiable. Verifiable lies, and the sources who create them predictably and consistently, should not be considered a "genuine result" for a query regarding things that are happening right now. Pr…

Cases like RT are clear cut to you. Others have other opinions. I think that the Russian claims that Ukraine is harboring neo-nazis are significantly bunk and are poor excuse for the invasion, but I also think you can't deny that the Azov Brigade exists, and I want to hear the Russian take on that even if I think it's half lies.

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

#244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Comparing a search provider to a Journalism Outlet rather than a Librarian. Well if you're going to start there its no surprise you reached the conclusion you did.

Librarians work for the state, therefore their acts are covered by public law that regulates censorship. DDG is a private company, therefore their acts are covered by private law that doesn't regulate censorship. I stated that before on my previous comment. I recommend you to improve your text comprehension skills, they're lacking.

Nice try. DuckDuckGo literally sold itself and became successful based off the promise of behaving more like a library than a journalist. The only thing you've pointed out so far is the obvious - they don't have a legal obligation to fulfill the premises they were built on. Great, as long as the free market is aware.

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

#246
post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

> Search results should return good information that is relevant to your query Then they would also filter ukrainian, NATO, EU, US, etc disinformation. Almost all the disinformation that you see on social media ( western ) is ukrainian, NATO, EU, US, etc disinformation since russia has self-isolated itself to some degree and much of russian media/propaganda has been banned. If DDG said we will down-rank sites associa…

Not all disinformation is created equal, and that's a critical difference.

The Russian and Ukrainian sides are not moral equals.

If Russia says Ukraine is full of drug addicts, whores and nazis, and that bombing hospitals is necessary to protect itself from Ukraine - that's of course disinformation.

If Ukraine says they have killed 10,000 Russian soldiers, when the real number is closer to 5,000 - that too is disinformation (exaggeration) and I'm not interested in seeing it strictly censored for multiple reasons. 1) It's not a radical exaggeration, such as claiming they've killed 250,000 soldiers or entirely stopped the Russian assault; and 2) it contains quite interesting information: a claim of significant invader deaths (from the supposedly mighty Russian military), which prompts inquiry as to just how bad Russia is fairing. While Ukraine for example has exaggerated their successes, their successes have been remarkable and have shown Russia to be mismanaged, incompetent, weak, and everything else one would expect of a typical authoritarian regime - it looks like a duck, it quacks like a duck, and how wonderful it is a duck. Probably the most remarkable thing about Putin's Russia - considering the kleptocracy - was that it had supposedly managed to maintain a very potent, mostly competent military, which is unusual for such a long authoritarian slog. That turned out to be false, Putin is wildly incompetent as are most authoritarians historically. He's no different than what we've seen in the past with other strong-man dictatorships like Hussein (also a paper tiger military, no coincidence the US chewed through their mediocre Soviet hardware too).

Not all disinformation provides anything valuable to the context as far as anti-fog-of-war information goes. Some disinformation is particularly worthless garbage. Plenty of what Ukraine is revealing does reveal valuable information, whereas very little of what Russia has been saying does the same.

And morally I'm not interested in Russia winning. I'm interested in Russia losing in humiliating fashion, getting isolated, having its economy chopped down by 75%, and in the coming decades seeing the nation split into three or four countries and overall massively weakened to prevent the Russian empire from attempting to emerge again with the next Putin that must inherently follow from their culture of power and conquest lust.

I'm no more interested in leveling the playing field for Russia as I would be for Nazi Germany. They're increasingly similar monsters, and Putin is only likely to get worse as time continues on. The absolute last thing the West should do is treat Ukraine and Russia similarly. We should do whatever it takes to defeat Russia, including winning the propaganda war - the only alternative is to vacate that space to Russia (a neutral outcome in propaganda is next to impossible).

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

#247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I think it is immoral for some business executive to make sweeping decisions about what the commoners are / aren't allowed to see I used to have this point of view, but it's clear lately that certain types of information do not result in good outcomes if processed by the uneducated. The U.S. is already going in the direction of a dystopia if you haven't noticed. More free speech isn't going to help gas, housing, or…

You had clearly already decided that all of these societal ills where either caused by bad information being processed by “the uneducated” or would be worsened by it. So this comment says more about how you view the uneducated than it says about the merits and demerits of censorship.

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

#248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This word keeps coming in this comments section: "spam." Spam was never mentioned in the Tweet, the source of this discussion. In fact no one in the comments section is talking about spam either, unless its a pathetic debunking attempt. They are talking about genuine results being down-ranked based on their ideological, even morally unscrupulous content, and why that is harmful to intelligent people who don't need th…

Is propaganda a "genuine result"? Yeah yeah, one person's truth is another person's propaganda and sometimes the lines are blurry. But cases like RT are pretty clear cut. Sometimes people actually do lie, and those lies are verifiable. Verifiable lies, and the sources who create them predictably and consistently, should not be considered a "genuine result" for a query regarding things that are happening right now. Pr…

Intelligent people are better off not patronized - and fighting disinformation through censorship rather than rebuttal is a pathetic reflection on the state of society. This type of censorship makes it harder for intelligent people to make clear rebuttals and reinforces a culture of tarring people taking the first step of looking into the other side for this purpose.

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

#249
Maybe this won't be a popular opinion here -- but it seems to me that there should be a search engine that actively acts with intentional bias to weed out publishers and websites that, according to that search engine's standards, simply aren't worth listing in their search engine.

Kind of a hybrid search engine, and curated list of websites.

Google set the standard by trying to make everything algorithmic. I can't help but think that most people would be served better if there was a search engine in the market that actively curated the listings.

I'm not saying that such a search engine should be the only option, but I do think that it could be a valuable addition to the search landscape.

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