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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”

#461

Post by deltarholamda »

empthought wrote: post #416
deltarholamda wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This strategy is vulnerable to supply-chain attacks on your information sources There is no single strategy, there is no silver bullet. I certainly didn't intend to imply that there was. One can only make their best effort. Any strategy is going to have flaws. >which is a far cry from astroturfing and falsehoods made out of whole cloth that Russian sources typically engage in American mass media has historically don…

> I wouldn't downplay the editorial decisions that you mention either. That is a hugely powerful lever of control. Yanking RT or whoever from search results is exactly that, only this time it is exercised by corporate tech companies. The costs of letting disinformation flow freely are far greater than the costs of downranking sources known for disinformation. One only need look at the antivax movement to confirm this…

>The costs of letting disinformation flow freely

As I said, "one can always find a reason why this thing is worse than this other thing, and one is therefore justified in doing whatever it is one wanted to do anyway." Simply slap a "disinformation" label on it.

I hope you are similarly motivated by these airy principles when the next government employs these same tactics to do things you do not agree with, but I rather suspect you will not be.

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

#462

Post by danShumway »

freediver wrote: post #443
danShumway wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hrm. I always wonder in these situations, what about the slippery slope in the opposite direction? "Political bias" is not a well-defined term; different people have different opinions about what topics are political and about what counts as bias. So let's say that DuckDuckGo commits to not doing any filtering or sorting based on a nebulous term like "politics". If you choose to go down that path - what concepts are…

A search engine should have ranking factors that tie to the end goal of providing the most relevant results to their users. However this decision is about unilaterally down-ranking a subset of results because of the political view expressed on them (if it was about misinformation than surely they would want to down-rank all misinformation equally - if they had capability to do so in the first place). This is at the s…

> if it was about misinformation than surely they would want to down-rank all misinformation equally - if they had capability to do so in the first place

They don't have that capability. DuckDuckGo also doesn't have the capability to surface only correct JS code when I search for a programming concept. There isn't a binary here, all manual upranking and downranking of any content is always playing whack-a-mole, none of it is systemic or equally applied -- that's why it's manual and not automatic.

DuckDuckGo tries to strike a balance between manually downranking misinformation that is obviously wrong, while being careful about downranking in less clear-cut situations. It is justifiable to critique them in whether or not they've done a good job of that, and it is definitely justifiable to ask about why they don't apply the same standards to certain other propaganda sources. But that's not how I originally read your comment: "The problem discussed here is not of search quality bias nature, but of political bias nature which should not have a place in a general web search engine."

There's a big difference between saying that a specific search engine isn't doing a good job of stamping out all misinformation, or that it's being very selective about which misinformation it cares about, and saying that political content should be immune from ranking systems.

----

> This is at the same level of absurdity from a search engine user perspective as would downranking sites because their tld is .net or because they are in italian language.

You know that most search engines downrank non-English-language sources for you if you're located in America, right? They try to return results in languages that you're likely to be able to read.

And search engines don't base rankings off of tlds because that would be trivial for adversaries to take advantage of by switching to upranked tlds. It's not at all comparable to deciding to downrank a news source.

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

#463

Post by colpabar »

atlantas wrote: post #396
HeckFeck wrote: post #153

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…

> I will now trust my own media and sources even less, if they rely on silencing the competition and insist on controlling As you should! It's actually exactly what authoritarian governments like Russia do. They silence and control information, blocking out other sources aside from their own propaganda. Everything else is said to be dangerous disinformation.

It's insane to me that people don't think this way. The mainstream US media, in perfect lockstep with the gov, told us all that iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and then we found out it was a complete fabrication. And most of those people still have jobs!

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

#464

Post by joe_the_user »

kube-system wrote: post #66
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.

"unbiased" doesn't mean "unfiltered". For example, I don't want spam or malware in my search results. Search results should return good information that is relevant to your query, and filter out anything that is not that.

"unbiased" doesn't mean "unfiltered".

What else can a filter be aside from a bias? Clearly, I'd want a search engine that's biased against spam and generally against "automatically generated" content.

It's hard for people to wrap their heads around how many search judgements are inherently editorial decisions - and how much of this is OK. One factor is that mainstream American news, from Hearst to the NY Times spent a long indoctrinating people on the claim that their position in the political spectrum was "balanced" where everything else was "extreme".

One actually useful thing a search engine could do is allow it's users to see it's biases and even configure their particular preferred filters - within reason. Could be a selling point.

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

#465

Post by kweingar »

xdennis wrote: post #455

This is a very good move on DDG's part. You can't have free information during a war. It would be wrong during peace, but we can't afford this during the Russian rampage that's happening right now.

To shamelessly steal a comment from the user president:

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”

#466

Post by LexGray »

hnuser847 wrote: post #18
diego_moita wrote: post #11

Good! 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…

> In case someone hasn't noticed, there is a war going on in Europe. That is a circumstance where some of these cases apply. Indeed, there's a war going on and there's a tremendous amount of propaganda being circulated from both sides. The question is, why is DDG okay with amplifying Ukranian/NATO propaganda and not Russian propaganda? Is it because NATO is the "good" guy and Russia is the "bad" guy? When the US inva…

Given the information controls since Vietnam we have been lucky so far. This may well have been triggered by regulatory grumblings and could be a sign of greater US involvement.

At least to me it feels similar to how big tech does weird things under gag orders.

I can guess once this is in place we can expect government mandated rationing with chips diverted to weapons.

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

#467

Post by Arnavion »

stale2002 wrote: post #453
moltke wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It does work for that. It does not. I used the moon thing from last year as an example. Here[1] is a very noncontroversial query that still yields factually incorrect results in the box at the top. Yes if you read the results carefully and think about it you'll realize it's wrong but then you're doing the same thing you would be doing otherwise. [1] https://www.google.com/search?sxsrf=APq-WBv0RNgr6Q3zUOjDc1lM...

> It does not. In the "Abraham Lincoln’s birthday" example that the person gave, it absolutely does work that way in regards to the user's motivations. When a user googles for "Abraham Lincoln’s birthday" They are almost certainly attempting to use a search engine as an oracle of truth. > that still yields factually incorrect results Search engines aren't perfect. That does not change the fact that the oracle of trut…

helen___keller wrote:

>This is how google ended up with their modern design that discourages website clicks, they did research into their users and realized most people searching “Abraham Lincoln’s birthday” want to see the top result “February 12, 1809” and not the top result “https://www.loc.gov/item/today-in-history/february-12”

But this is a false dichotomy. There are more options than either an infobox that says "February 12, 1809" and a "February 12 in history" page. I think you can agree that a link to the Wikipedia article on Abraham Lincoln will be a fine search result. At most the search engine needs to be smart enough to match "birthday" in the search query against variations of "born on" that are present in the article.

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

#468

Post by Camas »

paxys wrote: post #194

Judging by the replies to this thread, I don't think anyone here knows what an algorithm is. How do you think any search engine on the planet "objectively" decides how to show you the top 10 results for a search term out of billions of possibilities? There are a thousand knobs constantly being turned behind the scenes depending on the preferences of the operator. "Non-biased search results" are impossible by definiti…

Unbiased search is impossible, so DDG should be deliberately biased?

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

#469

Post by pydry »

colpabar wrote: post #463
atlantas wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I will now trust my own media and sources even less, if they rely on silencing the competition and insist on controlling As you should! It's actually exactly what authoritarian governments like Russia do. They silence and control information, blocking out other sources aside from their own propaganda. Everything else is said to be dangerous disinformation.

It's insane to me that people don't think this way. The mainstream US media, in perfect lockstep with the gov, told us all that iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and then we found out it was a complete fabrication. And most of those people still have jobs!

Meanwhile Russia concocts evidence of chemical weapons labs and those same people who believed in WMDs cant fathom how Russians could fall for this shit....

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

#470

Post by pvaldes »

freediver wrote: post #98
enragedcacti wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really don't understand this view point. Isn't a search engine's entire job to effectively 'censor' the parts of the internet that aren't relevant or helpful to your search query? Is it censorship for them to downrank flat-earth content when you are trying to learn about how to chart a flight? Flat-earthers certainly have a lot of ideas about how charting a course on a flat earth works but that doesn't mean it's he…

There are many problematic aspects of DDG's decision, but here are just a couple of angles. Both sides in the conflict spread disinformation. DDG desides to downrank only results related to disinformation from one side. This makes it a decision based on a political bias and not search quality bias (which would cause all disinformation to be downranked - which is OK and actually a desireable thing in a search engine).…

> Both sides in the conflict spread disinformation.

One of them does not have free press and kill journalists. Both cases are not even remotely comparable.

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