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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”

#301
post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any alternatives? Open source search...?

Alternatives? like you are really longing for lies?

I want to see what RT and Sputnik News are saying. And the misinformation published by them is no more common than the misinformation published by mainstream media sources.

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

#302
post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> "Good" is a quality of the content itself, made up of factors such as relevancy, accuracy, completeness, readability etc.

It’s impossible to quantify a rating based on these subjective qualities you listed. I think the point is you can’t remove the human element from ranking search results without leaving the search engine open to exploitation.

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

#303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You're literally just spouting the West's approved propaganda and don't even realize it.

Actually I have followed a plethora of information from individuals on the ground and historical information from multiple sources. What I have posted is as close to objective reality as I can obtain and I am very confident it its veracity.

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

#304
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We're arguing the same point, I think. The GP was arguing against a straw man that only one kind of spam should be downranked.

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

#305
post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't agree more. 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 ima…

> Russian propaganda is more or less banned from German viewers (with RT and others being banned). is rt.com also banned?

Yes, the EU required internet providers to ban RT and other Russian state media. Elon Musk notably tweeted that Starlink was going to attempt to fight the censorship.

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

#306
post #131

Earlier 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…

Forget leveling the playing field. Removing western disinformation is still important too. Forget specific positives or disinformation about Russia specifically attacking Ukraine. There’s plenty of other misinformation from western powers relating to Russia. I haven’t seen much chatter at all about the western specifically America’s role in what Russia is today. How often is the IMF and related neoliberal capitalist/imperialist intervention in Russia, starting the second the USSR dissolved, brought up?

This is important stuff to know. I did a few sample searches. The results aren’t wrong. They are incredibly dry. Many being direct studies and long PDFs. People aren’t going to go through that stuff when seeing how Russia is getting rekt or Ukraine is suffering or gas prices are up are consumable via many pics, quick takes, social media takes, and more.

I think it’s important also because of your wording. Russia being the kleptocracy. You didn’t say the west isn’t. It is heavily implied IMO though.

Another unfortunate issue is this all will cloud the west in even more misinformation. The best non dense news knowledge from TV I gained regarding Yemen was from RT. The west is awful at covering the tragedy there. Not to mention complicit too. RT was slanted ofc. Not saying that’s what should be aimed for.

Similarly if Russian economy collapsing by 75% and screwing with the lives of 100M avg Russians as it splits into 3 or 4 is something to aim for. The non mention of NATO being a pointless organization today but especially in a collapsed Russia world would be good to know. That info won’t be given out much I presume. Also to note. No one really suffers remotely like 100M+ Russians if NATO disbanded. Though I’m sure the massive amt of misinformation when the west doesn’t want to keep helping out the millions of Russian refugees in your dreamt future will be absolutely insane. Just like relatively minor amounts of refugees now keep getting called things like the migrant crisis.

Russia should not be hurting and killing Ukrainians. America and others should not be helping Yemen or Palestine or other places have innocents suffering or killed. Most of all, we shouldn’t get ourselves into a state where we keep patting ourselves on the back and pointing to boogeymen to escape culpability. Which is pretty much guaranteed in a future of a collapsed Russia with millions of refugees that NATO will have little interest in helping but will engage in a massive amt of misinformation to escape the very obvious moral failings. At least this is all almost certain to happen based on the present (excluding the help Ukrainian refugees are getting which may be proving the pt more by being such a markedly unique exception) and past.

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

#307

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.

Search results have to be "biased" towards being related to your query to be useful, I would argue that state sponsored Russian propaganda is probably not particularly related to most queries.

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

#308
post #300
post #290

Suppose 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…

>Should I simply accept that this site is the correct top result for my users' queries, Yes, your users aren't using your search engine as an oracle for the truth, they're using it to find pages with similar text. It's their job (and specifically not yours) to determine how well the text they find corresponds with reality. Perhaps they're even aware the site is factually incorrect and enjoy reading it for the novelty…

> Yes, your users aren't using your search engine as an oracle for the truth, they're using it to find pages with similar text.

I’m confident this is factually incorrect for a very very large subset of searches. Probably a majority.

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

#309
post #168

DuckDuckGo 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…

How exactly is it bing? Refaced and operated by microsoft? Refaced and scrapped results from bing? Any more info on this?

When you do a search on DuckDuckGo, they query Bing using an API and show the results that Bing return. DuckDuckGo is mostly Bing with some extra "value-added" embellishments.

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

#310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, this move by DDG will have the opposite effect of what is intended. I will now trust my own media and sources even less, if they rely on silencing the competition and insist on controlling what I access "for my own good". Such dirty tactics are insulting, even more so when delivered under a sneering benevolent guise. As if they have perfect knowledge of my motives and wishes. What if I'm genuinely curious as…

Would you trust a source of medical information less if it declined to present or link to information that breathing CO is healthy, drinking mineral spirits is fine, and handling mercury with bare skin is safe and fun?

I don’t know. Since this sort of thing isn’t happening and the general atmosphere of everything is unlike your hypothetical. I’m not sure it much matters.
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