What if my intend was to find the Russian misinformation?
DuckDuckGo “down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation”
271–280 of 865 posts
Re: DuckDuckGo “down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation”
#272Earlier quoted context omitted.
All you have to do is scroll past the US misinformation, on past EU misinformation and you'll find it right there. Easy.
Sorry but it just isn't the same. Russia made it illegal -- punishable by 15 years in prison -- to accurately describe their invasion of Ukraine.
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Re: DuckDuckGo “down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation”
#273Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "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.
Maybe the user was actually looking to pay their phone bill? (The first result in DDG is orange.fr, not the color or the fruit)
My point is, there's no objective way to determine what good search results are. There are thousands of different objective measurements which people combine in subjective ways to create a subjective algorithm.
Re: DuckDuckGo “down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation”
#274Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Is this materially different from filtering other abuse like SEO spam? Yes it is. The undesirability of spam is much more universal than "misinformation", and its definition is much less controversial. And we don't care whether the spam is Russian, American, Nigerian or whatever. The motivation in this case is clearly more paternalistic compared to filtering spam.
Yeah I just don't agree with any of that. Spam is infamously hard to identify and consistently define. My spam is your content. I'd argue what Russia is doing here is spam. They're laundering their message through media outlets with domains with much stronger SEO positioning than any official government domain. (You may disagree this is "spam" but that's kind of my point.) Meanwhile I think there's pretty broad conse…
> My spam is your content.
Tell me of one person who wants to read unsolicited viagra offers and all that stuff.
> I'd argue what Russia is doing here is spam.
Problem is that there are a lot of half-truths embedded in pro-russian media outlets and many things that, how false they may be, seem to be their genuine viewpoints. I think it would be better to engage with that stuff and separate the half-truths from the lies instead of simply hiding everything away.
Re: DuckDuckGo “down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation”
#275Most of the comments here seem to have the same basic misconception. They think it is possible to act without bias. This is simply not possible -- even algorithms have bias.
For example, machine learning based on a human dataset will learn the human biases. This is well documented.
Instead of aiming for no bias -- it is better to explicitly outline one's biases, as well as how one is responding to those biases (or not).
The unfortunate situation, is that companies like DuckDuckGo, Google, etc, would like you to believe that they present "unbiased" results, despite the literal impossibility of this. Much better to make any and all biases explicit, so that nobody is deceived.
Re: DuckDuckGo “down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation”
#276> 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.
War seems to be the only situation in which it is somehow morally imperative to only get one side of the story...
Re: DuckDuckGo “down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation”
#277Most of the comments here seem to have the same basic misconception. They think it is possible to act without bias. This is simply not possible -- even algorithms have bias. For example, machine learning based on a human dataset will learn the human biases. This is well documented. Instead of aiming for no bias -- it is better to explicitly outline one's biases, as well as how one is responding to those biases (or no…
> Instead of aiming for no bias ...
It's not all or nothing. You can both minimize bias and explicitly outline biases.
Re: DuckDuckGo “down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation”
#278Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 disinfo…
I agree that the two sides aren't morally equal. However, that doesn't mean that more moral disinformation is less so disinformation, and choosing to let one over the other is being biased.
You could argue however that this a good bias to have, and that's definitely a discussion that deserves to be had and where I'm personally not decided. However, it's good to agree that this is indeed a bias beforehand.
Re: DuckDuckGo “down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation”
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
ask yourself why this particular variety of disinformation written to "go viral" on social media and in search results is different from any other. ask yourself whether your own state's government ever engages in similar activity, or whether this is something that only this specific state government in question does. ask yourself why other people making decisions about what kinds of propaganda you do and don't see is…
Did DDG say they're upranking "good" propaganda and downranking "bad" propaganda? What I understood from the tweets is that DDG is downranking propaganda. Russia happens to produce a lot of it, so they'd be more impacted.
what is and is not propaganda is subjective. something your state government tells you that you take for granted to be true may in fact be propaganda. but in the absence of a Universal Propaganda Detection Algorithm, whether or not something is propaganda is up to personal interpretation.
Re: DuckDuckGo “down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation”
#280No post body was provided.