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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”

#801

Post by skinnymuch »

hobs wrote: post #429
skinnymuch wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The united states has several states passing laws so doctors can proscribe ivermectin for covid, we genuinely live in a world where homeopathy is a the option Steve Jobs took instead of cancer therapy. I have no understanding of why you would say this is not happening when product brands like GOOP make tons of money from outright hocus pocus health bs.

I think Ivermectin was part of the CDC’s COVID prevention or when you have light levels of Covid lists back in 2020 and early 2021. I remember seeing it from progressive people sharing stuff before it became the term and meme it became today. That makes it a really interesting point too, but it makes all sides look bad.

OTOH, you’re right Steve Jobs and what he did...yikes. That sort of thinking is harmful for society.

Yes GOOP is disgusting. So disgusting.

None of this is close to laws being passed for serious misinformation sort of stuff like your original post said. GOOP is bullshit and like so much others. It just happens to be peddled by some famous people. Since the ivermectin thing is more complicated, it doesn’t work.

America having its massive problem with opoids and how much it got prescribed shows how difficult the situation is. Or how anti steroids America and the world is. It seems too nuanced and difficult to decipher. Or to say one way is correct.

Overall in spirit and likely general vibes. I believe we are overall closer to the same thinking than not.

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

#802

Post by jollybean »

eric_cc wrote: post #767
crayboff wrote: post #597

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been waffling between whether or not I think this is a good thing. I am curious on your thoughts: A lot of malicious actors have learned how to game the search ranking algorithms by making carefully crafted lies that are easily spread as truths online quickly. They are able to get their fake news to spread (and this rank higher) in ways that legitimate sources can't. Most people only ever look at the first page…

While you’re waffling > If you were a search engine provider and knew that viral, fake stories How does the search engine company know whether something is true or not?

It's at the core of Google algorithm: page rank. It uses 'trust'.

That actually maps to how we work as a society.

We cannot be experts in everything, we do not have the time, ability, wherewithal.

So we 'trust' certain sources: Teachers, Doctors, Lawyers, Judges, Police, more than we do others i.e. criminals, sources of gossip, arbitrary people.

This is why when people form those institutions fail us, it's a much bigger problem than otherwise. We should fire a teacher for teaching things that are wrong, but we don't worry about the guy walking down the street spouting nonsense.

Over time, we learn who to trust, and also the ways in which we can trust them. 'Nature' has a lot of credibility in some ways, but it also doesn't mean they are always right, and, when it comes to softer issue, they can be politicised.

Judges have more integrity than the average person, but they can also be biased.

The NYT is a good source of information, but it depends if it's 'straight news or opinion'.

Putin has a 'propaganda Army' of people trying to convince people of certain things, much of which are not true. People around the world will believe it if they are exposed to enough of it.

The Russian and Cheese population apparently are willing to believe that UKR government is a bunch of 'Nazis and Drug Dealers'. Which is perverse.

'Information Reputation' is a really big deal and the only way it will work as a society is if we give the 'Conch' to those with greater credibility, otherwise, people will believe in 'whatever'. You can tell people almost anything and 30% of them will believe it if they want to, which is enough people to tilt the needle on so many issues.

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

#803

Post by zuminator »

Clubber wrote: post #791
zuminator wrote: post #784

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think I'm arguing in bad faith? That I'm deliberately advancing an argument I know to be untrue? OK, interesting... 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.…

>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. I don't disagree with most of what you said, but I don't think that's a justification for censorship. The non-curated internet did come up with Wikipedia and a lot of great source…

Good points, honestly. I'll just add that I don't think down-ranking amounts to censorship, rather it seems a good compromise between that and Babel, in that a casual low-information browser won't see known misinformation as a top result, but a more engaged reader can still locate it down the page if they wish.

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

#804

Post by atlantas »

PromKwing wrote: post #788
atlantas wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I replaced mainstream media with Breaking Points ( https://www.youtube.com/c/breakingpoints ). I've found them to be far more reliable.

Yikes. Imagine replacing media outlets with a right-wing youtuber and thinking that's far more reliable.

Yikes. Imagine thinking Breaking Points is right-wing.

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

#805

Post by croutonwagon »

spiderice wrote: post #500
snowman-yelling wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Drudge was literally the first link in my results. Haha.

I can almost assure you it wasn't. I'm guessing the top result is > drudge.com Which is not the Drudge Report, but the Drudge "Retort". The Drudge Report, seems to be completely removed, obviously intentionally. If I'm wrong, let me know. But I'd be very surprised if you're getting the Drudge Report at the top hit, and everybody else isn't getting it on the first multiple pages.

Here it is in my browser (which admittedly is a somewhat "hardened" privacy-wise version of FF).

https://imgur.com/a/KJL03NW

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

#806

Post by [deleted] »

prox wrote: post #717
ece wrote: post #661

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like good news can distill down to: if there's not enough fact checking in the right domain(s), the editor fucked up. Conspiracy theories, and propaganda obviously fail this test, but do not do so online often enough. Especially not when grifters/propagandists are trying to make money through ads or are state funded by an autocratic government. Should DDG take into account what is and isn't fact-checked? Absol…

I agree. I also believe transparency should be there on what changes are made in some shape or form. Unlike Google, DDG could actually do this.

[deleted]

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

#807

Post by danShumway »

username3 wrote: post #799
danShumway wrote: post #789

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I'm commenting on the fact that search engines do block propaganda sources in the US when they think they're a significant source of harmful propaganda, but very obviously they don't block propaganda sources that they don't think are propaganda. Your problem is that these engines disagree with you about what is and isn't a harmful propaganda source. That's a reasonable disagreement to have. But you're trying to p…

> they don't block propaganda sources that they don't think are propaganda That’s the point of contention. > But you're trying to phrase this like it's some kind of deliberate action or general policy on their part, and it just doesn't make any sense. It doesn’t make sense because I’m saying that. Users upset with DDG understand that everyone is blinded by bias, so don’t attempt to filter topics that can be affected…

> The solution is give those users options for unfiltered results

Important to remember at this point in the conversation, DuckDuckGo didn't say that they were going to filter these results (although I also wouldn't really have a problem with that), they announced that they were going to downrank some of the sites.

Safe search toggles turn off actual content removal, which kind of makes sense -- there's a list of "mature" sites that are included in the list of possible search results or excluded. But ranking is different, turning off a site ranking doesn't make any sense in the context of a search engine. You want a toggle to make results no longer be a list?

Everything on DDG is ranked, everything is. There aren't separate categories of ranked and unranked content, there's no set of websites where DuckDuckGo isn't ranking them alongside other websites. It doesn't make any sense to say that DuckDuckGo shouldn't rank political content or news sites when returning them in searches, I don't know from a UI perspective what that would even look like.

I guess completely randomly sorting the search results for those queries? But... I mean, no one would want that feature, you would never be able to find relevant information for a political query.

Even before DuckDuckGo made this announcement and even before the war in Ukraine started, DuckDuckGo was always ranking these sites. There was never a period of time where these sites weren't being ranked higher or lower on search pages than other sites, and that ranking was always being determined in part by DuckDuckGo's internal bias about how rankings should work and what was and wasn't a "relevant" or accurate news source. From day one, from the start of the search engine, they were always ranking political content.

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

#808

Post by eric_cc »

jollybean wrote: post #802
eric_cc wrote: post #767

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While you’re waffling > If you were a search engine provider and knew that viral, fake stories How does the search engine company know whether something is true or not?

It's at the core of Google algorithm: page rank. It uses 'trust'. That actually maps to how we work as a society. We cannot be experts in everything, we do not have the time, ability, wherewithal. So we 'trust' certain sources: Teachers, Doctors, Lawyers, Judges, Police, more than we do others i.e. criminals, sources of gossip, arbitrary people. This is why when people form those institutions fail us, it's a much big…

Cool but who determines trust scores?

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

#809

Post by Retric »

raxxorrax wrote: post #718
Retric wrote: post #669

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Should DDG show flat earth websites on basic searches about the earth? That’s not about silencing the competition that’s about doing the basic functions you’re looking for in a search engine. Delisting would be another story as people may legitimately want to find flat earth content, but this isn’t delisting the content is still there you just need to specifically look for it.

Since flat earth theories never posed any relevant problem, this is just a straw man to justify propaganda mechanisms.

Flat earth, anti vax groups, and national national governments running disinformation campaigns are all doing the exact same thing.

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

#810

Post by inopinatus »

native_samples wrote: post #740
paulmd wrote: post #581

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, do you feel that Fox and OAN deserve the same "reputation score" as Nature ? If so, why? For as much whining here about the importance of free and open discussion, it's unfortunately verboten to say it, but fortunately people will usually bring it up of their own volition. It is like the "why are all the highly educated people so liberal!?!?" thing, deep down you know the answer, and it's not actually "becaus…

I think you're under-estimating the quantity of articles Nature and associated journals publish that aren't scientific, or are outright wrong, just because they flatter the preconceptions of their readers. There's even a cute saying in science, "Just because it's published in Nature, doesn't mean it's wrong". Example: Nature published Flaxman2020, a modelling paper by the epidemiology team at ICL which claimed lockdo…

> Just because it's published in Nature, doesn't mean it's wrong

Quoting this without understanding the philosophy of science, in context of discussion rejecting an equivalence between cable television and a peer-reviewed journal, seems like textbook whataboutism.

All published science is wrong to some degree. The point is to be less wrong, in gestalt, as time goes on. We push back the boundaries of ignorance to discover more. TV punditry echo chambers, where they revel in wrongness, are the antithesis of this process.

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