Was there a particular issue with people searching and ending up on russian propaganda? I guess the ones who did will still do. In any case it may not seem so but we are at war with USSR v2, at least that s what russia is doing so it helps to keep some perspective here. As long as media is ran by people they will have censorship/bias and there will be no absolute free speech, as it s pretty clear that the most dictatorial regimes make heavy use of internet propaganda. Still, i think those things are more like PR moves, and maybe not overall positive: Russian propaganda is transparent, vicious and unashamed
DuckDuckGo “down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation”
431–440 of 865 posts
Re: DuckDuckGo “down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation”
#432Good! One more reason for me to remain a DDG user. This is the behaviour of responsible and accountable adults. "Censoring" is a word very badly understood and prone to manipulation. There are a lot of circumstances where suppression of information/opinion is justified: protecting intellectual property and copyrights, blocking doxing, prevent haters from doing harm against others, protection of military secrets or pe…
Would you be okay with media censoring content that opposed the Japanese internment because it was wartime during WW2?
Re: DuckDuckGo “down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation”
#433How about no? Pathetic from DDG. If you work there you should be ashamed of yourself. I will find a new search provider that doesn’t decide which political content I can see.
Re: DuckDuckGo “down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation”
#434Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Iraq war was wrong and stupid, it should never have happened. But that's just whataboutism. It doesn't make the Ukraine war or Russian disinformation any better to point out that the United States have messed up spectacularly more than just once. One difference, though, is that GWB never put anyone in prison for talking about the Iraq "war" or about how much the US government lied about WMD. > Is it because NATO…
The central point is that you need access to information to determine if a war is wrong and stupid. It is clear how censorship and propaganda can alter perception of who is the the good or bad guy.
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Re: DuckDuckGo “down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation”
#435DDG is a thin wrapper around Bing that makes it worse.
Re: DuckDuckGo “down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation”
#436I 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.
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…
What I really want is to have a setting where I can turn these kinds of filters on and off, or to different/customized priorities.
Search is a tool for me to use: give me better control of the results that I can get. Choosing between different ranking algorithms would be wonderful too, to skip around different SEO strategies
Re: DuckDuckGo “down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation”
#437I 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.
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…
This whole Ukraine war teached me a thing I haven't noticed before: I simply can't trust ANY media, search engine, or social network anymore.
It's a sad state of affairs, but since the invasion started my only source of "news" related to the war is a few, and I a said a FEW, Youtube channels.
I'm brazilian and one channel I recommend is Fernando Ulrich's channel. He interviewed (in english) a lot people (ukrainians, russians), commented on the geopolitical causes for the war a month before it started for real etc.
Through his channel I found the lectures by John J Mearsheimer, and that's the only reason I can say that I "understand" what the hell is happening over there.
It's a real shame that a financial advice channel, from a 3rd world country, is the last bastion of thrust I can find in order to get informed about the most important geopolitical event of the last decade. The mainstream media/tech oligopoly are a disgrace to mankind.
Re: DuckDuckGo “down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation”
#438Good! One more reason for me to remain a DDG user. This is the behaviour of responsible and accountable adults. "Censoring" is a word very badly understood and prone to manipulation. There are a lot of circumstances where suppression of information/opinion is justified: protecting intellectual property and copyrights, blocking doxing, prevent haters from doing harm against others, protection of military secrets or pe…
The problem is that their product was advertised as not doing this. They are totally free to do this, but it makes their whole product unfit for purpose.
It also makes you question if they actually value privacy.
Re: DuckDuckGo “down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation”
#439You 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.
Because social media gave literal juveniles power in numbers whereas in real life their opinions would have been largely ignored. On social media, you don't know if you're talking to a high-schooler, a bot, or a state sponsored troll. Yet their opinion is essentially weighted the same as a PhD scholar.
Re: DuckDuckGo “down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation”
#440Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't get the comparison with newspapers, maybe 40 years ago that was one of the limited ways of information discovery but we've had the web since then. People are free to discover the world's information and given the saturation of that information, differing points of view on it. However, with two dominant search engines (Google and Bing/DuckDuckGo/Yahoo) there is little diversity and so censorship has more impac…
> I don't get the comparison with newspapers, The point is not newspapers "per se". The point is private entity, as opposed to public state. As I stated clearly, freedom of speech is a principle applied upon public law, not private law. Therefore, "censorship" is something the state does, not something private parts do among themselves. Are anti-spam filters "censorship"? No, because they're implemented by private ci…
Censorship is not just the sole domain of a government. Private entities are perfectly capable of participating in it. You're conflating two distinct ideas.