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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”

#571

Post by smsm42 »

KarlKemp wrote: post #223
smsm42 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Good information" is very subjective. Some people think Fox News information is good, others think it's all lies. Some people think Wikipedia is the closest thing to Word of God that we can get, others think it's a bunch of kids with too much free time on their hands writing about things they have no idea about. Some people think the US government is trustworthy, others think it lied so many times only an idiot can…

"Good information", almost synonymous with "truth", is not subjective. It is objective, observable fact. The fact that is a lot of disagreement, propaganda, and lies concerning that truth does not render it subjective.

You're saying as knowing what the "truth" is is an obvious thing, and anybody could do it, and anybody could recognize whether certain statement is "truth" or not. But it is far from being the case. Many very smart and very honest people routinely disagree on many subjects whether something is truth or not, and on top of that many people also make statements that may look like truth but turn out not to be after detailed and complicated investigation. You can not expect an owner of the search engine to be the arbiter in these disagreements and to perform those investigations. And even if they did, who would ensure they themselves are being objective and not just enacting their own biases and hiding facts that they think are inconvenient to them? How do you observe this fact? The truth may be not subjective, in a pure Platonic sense, but our knowledge about it and our trust in ways how to get to it certainly would be.

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

#572

Post by maratc »

mopsi wrote: post #541
kikokikokiko wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

> I simply can't trust ANY media, search engine, or social network anymore. It's one of the key goals of Russian information warfare: to create a feeling that you can't tell truth apart from fiction, and to force you into apathy and paralyze you, so you become unable to act and protect your interests. Russians are among the largest pushers of conspiracy theories from Covid to QAnon, and have been for a very long time…

> Mearsheimer is an idiot and nobody takes him seriously in Eastern Europe

Maybe they should have listened to that idiot when he suggested in 1993 that Ukraine retains some of its nuclear weapons to deter Russia from attacking it in the future.

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

#573

Post by TechBro8615 »

tonguez wrote: post #568
TechBro8615 wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like you're advocating for pushing censorship responsibility to the user. I agree this would be nice — in fact you could consider uBlock Origin a form of client-side censorship that already exists. In practice, I'm not sure how much adoption such a system would get, if used for censorship purposes. The main problem is the underlying truth that most censorship proponents are not actually pro-censorship of th…

Stopped reading at “censorship responsibility”.

Maybe keep reading then (or configure your censorship software to truncate comments from TechBro8615).

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

#574

Post by bobobob420 »

awb wrote: post #295
bobobob420 wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And making some stance about what results you should see based on a war that is going on is wrong. If someone searches for a keyword they should get back results that are relevant to the keyword. They should not have results filtered on this impression that those results come from paticular sources that are deemed by DDG as russian propaganda. Search engines are not supposed to filter out propaganda. That propaganda…

We expect them to filter spam and scams. If RT / Sputnik use SEO to target the keyword “Ukraine conflict”, it creates a worse experience for users. Right now RT is not on the top page for that search term. I’m guessing that’s what they’re targeting. If you search “rt Ukraine conflict”, the #1 result is RT. You can still easily find content you’re looking for. It just won’t be part of those wide net searches I’m guess…

They did not state anything about seo spam. You are just assuming. They stated they are down ranking domains associated with Russian disinformation, meaning they are censoring Russia. If it was SEO spam then the fix for that would benefit all of search. I highly doubt they care about that, they are introducing censorship by domain on the basis the content served by the domain is not correct. Very tricky to actually verify and sleazy

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

#575

Post by orthecreedence »

ipaddr wrote: post #509
orthecreedence wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You cannot have a free market without transparency I've not heard this before. So I need to know the wages of the workers, what the CEO had for breakfast, the favorite color of all employees, the inventory and sales, etc for every single company in order for it to be a free market? I'm not arguing that knowing these things would be bad but actually curious of the boundaries you would draw when you say "transparency…

The more mature a market the more you would know. Transparency material to the market transaction. Knowing what employees ate would rarely provide value to whatever transaction you have. Understanding their selection process for the content they provide to you would be. What the hotdog vendor dreamed of last night doesn't inform my buying decision like the fact that it fell on the floor earlier would.

Maybe I want to know if the employees are all vegan or something before I support that company. I guess I'll frame the same question in a different context: if all needs are subjective, how do you objectively determine which information is important for a transaction?

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

#576

Post by pie42000 »

deltarholamda wrote: post #89
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…

>but do you really want your search engine to default to providing results from someone with a very clear agenda and a history of abusing their influence to carry out that agenda Have you met the US media? If you don't look at this massive coordinated effort and smell something fishy, I just don't know what to say.

You realize there was also a massive coordinated effort by the media to defeat Nazi Germany, right?

I know it's rare nowadays, but sometimes, gasp, large groups of people across organizations and industries can coordinate for a mutually beneficial and morally virtuous cause. At this point, I'm sure someone could start another massive genocide with HD livestreams of the gas chambers and some people would still be like "hmmm, this coordinated effort to stop Hitler 2.0 sure seems fishy".

I've lost all hope.

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

#577

Post by pie42000 »

deltarholamda wrote: post #564
archagon wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's just dull contrarianism: suspecting "something fishy" just because everyone's opinions happen to line up. (As opposed to, I dunno, an obvious collective response to a nation doing something incontrovertibly wrong?)

>As opposed to, I dunno, an obvious collective response to a nation doing something incontrovertibly wrong? Can you explain how this is incontrovertibly different than other foreign war entanglements from the past few decades?

When was the last time a sovereign, democratic, western nation invaded?

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

#578

Post by deanCommie »

spoils19 wrote: post #314
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…

The free market will decide what's a valuable search result or not, and I trust the freedom and liberty of people over any kind of curated, mutated ranking system.

> I trust the freedom and liberty of people

"Trust" is usually earned. On what basis have "people" earned your trust?

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

#579

Post by JakeAl »

cutemonster wrote: post #452
freediver wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about state sponsored Chinese propaganda? Or how about state sponsored New Zealand propaganda? Or state sponsored German propaganda? How about a corporation XYZ sponsored propaganda? What if you are Russian, Chinese, Kiwi, German or XYZ employee in these situations - or simply want to have equal access to information so you can make up your own world view? If you choose to go down this path - what propaganda is O…

It's called psychological warfare, what Putin is doing. And you're asking for an enemy state to be allowed to do that warfare, against Ukraine, Europe, the US, unhindered. This is not comparable to a company tricking people in buying more of their pointless stuff. > but of political bias nature No, what you're saying, would help a dictator that attacks another country.

The same could be said of the US, especially since the NDAA made it legal for the government to use propaganda on the domestic population.

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

#580

Post by colpabar »

einarfd wrote: post #486
colpabar wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

I remember following news during the buildup to that war. It was fairly obvious that those WMD claims was weak, and that was definitely brought up in the news. While I was mostly following European sources, so American sources might have been less insistent on that. But seriously, if your country wants to go to war, and local news sources is the only thing you look at. Then you aren't trying very hard to stay informe…

> Then you aren't trying very hard to stay informed

I don’t disagree with this, but I don’t think the burden should entirely be on us common folk. We are the ones being lied to. We can’t only focus on “staying informed,” it is critical that we start demanding the truth from the institutions we’re supposed to trust. If they don’t change, we need new institutions.

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