I've said it once and I've said it again - I don't need tech companies to tell me what is and isn't disinformation.
DuckDuckGo “down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation”
281–290 of 865 posts
Re: DuckDuckGo “down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation”
#282Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I just think censorship and cancellation is wrong and immoral, even if it is legally allowed. I think it is immoral for some business executive to make sweeping decisions about what the commoners are / aren't allowed to see HN mods actively hide and remove content, including political content from sites like RT & Sputnik: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html I don't think anyone is accusing HN of censor…
Hacker News is not a search engine.
It has search and I’ve used it as one.
Re: DuckDuckGo “down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation”
#283Maybe 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 he…
True, but very specific human intervention is very different to web scale algorithms. The algorithms are to an extent beyond accountability at a human level, but human intervention isn't.
Google is known to have 10's of thousands of "quality raters" for web pages. But they follow an algorithm. They will still have their own biases though. Not every one of them will rate pages the same.
The lines are very muddy for sure, but to say "I don't like this country and what it's saying and we're actively going to demote content ... somehow... " is the kind of manipulation that DDG users seem to be strongly disagreeing with. Particularly so with DDG because their entire index is Bing, and who knows whether they're doing the same? I would wager DDG does not know.
Re: DuckDuckGo “down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation”
#284I don't give a shit either way. But, damn, this backfired pretty bad for DDG.
Re: DuckDuckGo “down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation”
#285Earlier 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.
I'm not in Russia and DDG isn't limiting their distortion to Russian visitors to their site.
Re: DuckDuckGo “down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation”
#286DuckDuckGo is Bing, we know this because when Bing accidentally censored all image searches for "tank man", all image results disappeared from DuckDuckGo as well. Bing already announced that they were doing this, so maybe DuckDuckGo doesn't have any choice about it. https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/microsoft-rem... > The company said it would not display any state-sponsored RT and Sputnik content, de-ra…
> maybe DuckDuckGo doesn't have any choice about it.
Did you read the linked tweet?
"At DuckDuckGo, we've been rolling out search updates that down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation."
Sounds like they very much had a choice, and chose censorship. If they didn't and are actually just subject to Bing's whims, then they're lying. Neither of those are good.
Re: DuckDuckGo “down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation”
#287What if my intend was to find the Russian misinformation?
"I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that."
Re: DuckDuckGo “down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation”
#288You know, I am beginning to see that all that talk about mass psychosis caused by social isolation due to Covid and lockdowns was onto something. It explains a lot of what is happening right now. People are hyper-focused on only one thing and pay zero attention to long-term and larger-context consequences of their actions. And proud of it.
Not only that, but I’m observing lately that Western culture is becoming increasingly juvenile and generally lacking in wisdom, apparently by deliberately forgetting the past.
In the past you'd get your information via your city newspaper, maybe the NYT/WSJ or another national newspaper if you strived to be "well informed" and then your choice of the NBC/ABC/CBS nightly news because cable didn't exist yet. The filters in front of the bulk of the population were much stronger then.
Re: DuckDuckGo “down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation”
#289Earlier quoted context omitted.
analysts and historians saying "it's complicated"
But its not complicated at all. Ukraine is every year more prosperous and more connected to the west and Russia is weakening kleptocracy led by a disconnected, malicious, evil dictator that fears that if it doesn't seize the opportunity to return to its vision of a greater Russia that has a seat at the table in the grand scheme of things that it will ultimately be subsumed by either the west or by its own people who…
Let us not try to discount the complexity of the Russian motivation for war (and no matter what they are, it's still morally wrong).
Firstly, Ukraine was most prosperous in 2013. Even in recent years, Ukrainian wealth was growing more slowly than that of, say, Belarus. Even with sanctions, up until the pandemic, Russian GDP per capita PPP was increasing at a similar rate as with Ukraine. So it is unlikely that this was the only motivation, Ukraine was never on track to becoming more prosperous than Russia or it's satellites, nor even becoming relatively more prosperous in recent years. Indeed, Ukraine's economic system is pretty similar to that of Russia, and both countries have had similar levels of corruption by various indexes.
Then, there are obviously many other possible motivations, neither of them were a justification alone, and many analysts squabble still about what they were. So yes, "it's complicated".
Re: DuckDuckGo “down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation”
#290Suppose I go off and make a search engine, with my own algorithm for ranking search results. At first it works great. And then five years later, I find that, by a quirk in my algorithm, I find that a new site has risen to the top of all my results. This new site was created as a prank, and it contains authoritative-sounding but incorrect answers to common questions. The results returned are still relevant to my users, but they are now factually incorrect.
Should I simply accept that this site is the correct top result for my users' queries, since it has been ranked by my unbiased algorithm? Or should I decide to put my finger on the scale, and redesign my algorithm (possibly by simply reweighting results from this particular site) to change the rankings?
Does the answer change if the site is not a prank site, but is propoganda? Or an earnest-but-incorrect flat earther?