DuckDuckGo “down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation”

Anyway, moving on, I think you make some good points. Absoultely, so-called MSM has gaslighted people on various occasions. But that doesn't disprove the "duped by information campaigns" premise, it supports it. People are distrustful of MSM because they have been successfully deceived in the past. Millions were duped into thinking that the Iraq War was honestly precipitated by weapons of mass distruction not only because they were lied to by the government but because it was aided by passionate support in MSM, notoriously the New York Times.

And I'm not sold on the idea that communities are diligent in spotting their own misinformation. Look how homeopathy and astrology persist, generations after they have been shown to be bunk. In the case of homeopathy, people often seek it out because they feel duped and misled by Big Pharama. And that's a mistake that people make. They are rightfully skeptical of a mainstream idea but then latch on to an even more dubious idea because it seems like arcane truth, the fruit of their own research against the Brzezinski-esque medical establishment telling them what's for their own good. And then, because of the sunk cost fallacy, they hold onto the bad idea far longer than they should, even propagating it like a religion.

"One only need look at all the conspiracy theories that have turned out to be 100% true these past 2 years." What did you have in mind? I can only think of maybe one (non mainstream I presume) conspiracy theory that turned out to be 100% true. Most of the time, and this is key, just because the mainstream theory had flaws doesn't mean any of its concomitant conspiracy theories were 100% correct. In general they aren't, because like cancer cells they lack a control mechanism to keep them from continuously mutating. Plausible election irregularities turn into pallets of ballots, which turn into the ghost of Hugo Chavez owning voting machines, etc.

One of the problems with deciding to eschew mainstream sources of information, is that you often have no way of determining truth value through your own personal experience or expertise. I'm not a physician, epidemiologist or virologist. In order to conclude anything, I have to have faith that data provided by other people is accurate. In the past, unreliable sources of information were naturally lost over time because they got no support. But with SEO, spam, and/or astroturfing, any bit of misinformation can be propagated as broadly as the truth. And people are expected to wade through that and stumble upon the facts? Maybe, but have you heard of Borges' Library of Babel[0]? It's a story describing an infinite library where volumes are printed with random text, so every possible permutation of letters is there. Everything that is true is there, but so is every lie, and every near truth. But because all information is equally available without regard for truth, the library is effectively useless. That's what an entirely uncurated internet becomes.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Library_of_Babel

Here's the NY Times less than a month into the invasion noting that no active chemical weapons program had been found and that the administration's words seemed to be shifting about whether they believed it would ever be found: https://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/05/world/a-nation-at-war-ill...

Meanwhile, those who watched Fox News were never told that the earlier finds were not ongoing chemical weapons programs: https://www.politico.com/story/2015/01/poll-republicans-wmds...

> The moment it starts to openly prefer one kind of misinformation to other

When we talk about misinformation, it is not misinformation to say that Russia unjustly invaded Ukraine.

I think it's really important to clarify exactly what kind of misinformation we're talking about, because the Ukrainian narrative that Russia invaded for its own personal interests and not because of a territory dispute or to stamp out racism -- that narrative is not just another side of propaganda, it is the correct reading of the situation.

If you're talking about wartime propaganda like how many tanks have been lost, or about staged photos with prisoners, or whatever -- sure, that's propaganda that comes out of both sides. But that Russia invaded a country unjustly and is committing war crimes against it -- that is not propaganda, it's just the truth.

If you're upset that DuckDuckGo isn't treating both Russia/Ukraine's story about the cause of the war equally, then frankly, they shouldn't be treating them equally, because that's not a matter of opinion or something that needs to be tailored to the user -- regardless of who's using the engine and where they're located.

----

> Who has higher moral ground in a human conflict should be irrelevant from a standpoint of a general purpose web search engine, which DDG used to be.

There's a weird amount of conflation here between:

- moral judgements

- narrative about facts and conclusions drawn from facts

- factually incorrect claims

People can debate about the first two categories there and how search engines should respond to them, and we don't know exactly which sites DDG is looking at downranking or what their policies are for when they downrank a site. But if they are targeting the last category and if they are targeting outright lies about the cause of a conflict, then that would absolutely be something that's reasonable for a general-purpose search engine to do.

It's hard to debate about which category they're targeting if we don't know what the sites are (that in itself might be a criticism of the policy). But, still very important to understand that those three categories above are not all the same thing and not all of them should be dealt with in the same way.