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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”

#251

Post by mattwilsonn888 »

Spivak wrote: post #160
mattwilsonn888 wrote: post #93

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…

I just used spam sites as an example of "site that's highly ranked by the algorithm but are uncontroversially recognized as an error." Define a "genuine result" for a search engine that isn't the result of a process that arbitrarily ranks sites by certain metrics? Like it's humans all the way down, you can't escape that search engines are a large scale system representing "what a group of humans thinks the best resul…

As I said - nobody here is confused what spam entails. I'll remind you again the Tweet did not say it it targeting spam - and your conflation of spam with misinformation is a useful bit of ignorance for those who want control narratives. Slippery slope, friend.

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

#252

Post by kelnos »

KarlKemp wrote: post #223
smsm42 wrote: 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.

Absolutely, but then who is responsible for judging what is true and what is false? And why should I trust those people not only to be correct all the time, but also to never fall victim to their own biases when making these decisions?

The point is that there is no such thing as a perfect arbiter of truth. I may trust a friend with whom I have a close personal relationship to always tell me the truth, but it seems foolish to place that kind of trust in a corporation full of people you don't know.

In the end, we're back to just not filtering information at all, but instead leaving it up to each individual to decide what's true and which isn't. This also clearly has not worked. Maybe this problem is just not solvable.

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

#253

Post by Spivak »

colordrops wrote: post #186
Spivak wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's a difference between a low level filtering algorithm and manually curated results based on politics.

Of course, the right way to do it is to survey the common elements of sites whose politics you don't like and then add an "unbiased" content-agnostic rule punishing those elements.

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

#254

Post by xg15 »

While there is absolutely an enormous amount of misrepresentations or plain lies pushed by russian outlets, I'm worried that there might be too much temptation to use the current climate to control the narrative and label anything inconvenient as "disinformation".

I remember reading a few days ago a warning that cyber attacks of german government agencies are to be expected in the near future and that attackers could use the obtained knowledge in disinformation campaigns.

Of course enemy psyops could always use leaked information as a "grain of truth" to make a fabricated message seem more credible - however, I think if any kind of leaked classified information is automatically termed "disinformation", we went too far. At least, in such a climate, I don't know how something like the Snowden leaks would have been possible.

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

#255

Post by avgcorrection »

giaour wrote: post #33

Lot 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.

Info from both sides are supposed to go viral. Why does that part matter?

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

#256

Post by KarlKemp »

smsm42 wrote: post #206
kube-system wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Determining which search results are good to return is the hard part about creating a search engine, and it’s definitely not a problem limited to politically charged content.

Having worked on search engines, I know it only too well. Defining "good result" is a very complex task, that even without politics intruding involves a lot of judgement and very complex and un-obvious choices. Is good result something people would frequently click on? Then clickbait would be the best search results ever - do we really want this? Is it something a lot of people search for? Is it a popular site? Is it…

You are listing a bunch of methods that might be useful indicators of "good content", useful for search engine algorithms. But those are merely (possible) symptoms. "Good" is a quality of the content itself, made up of factors such as relevancy, accuracy, completeness, readability etc. Nobody said it was necessarily easy to judge these things, especially at scale. But that doesn't mean that it doesn't exist.

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

#257

Post by myth_drannon »

timeon wrote: post #230
myth_drannon wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any alternatives? Open source search...?

Alternatives? like you are really longing for lies?

I don't want others decide for me what is truth and what is lie. Others become corrupt, compromised (did it go well for Russians?).

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

#258

Post by kelnos »

kube-system wrote: post #242
KarlKemp wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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"?

This one is actually easy. Most commonly, orange is a color and a fruit. I'm sure we can all pretty easily list some objective facts about both of those things.

Orange is also the name of a town in some places, and a county in others. But I think you need more search terms in order to disambiguate. The search engine can't read minds, after all.

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

#260

Post by moralestapia »

freediver wrote: post #22

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.

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