Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

DuckDuckGo “down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation”

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

441–450 of 865 posts

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

#441

Post by Gareth321 »

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…

>Also, freedom of speech is a principle applied on the relation of people with the state, an issue for public law. This is about a private enterprise and its relations with its users, subject to the regulation of private law.

This is absolutely not what the principle of free speech is. Private companies censoring information can be every bit as insidious and damaging to society, and of course falls under the umbrella of free speech. I think you are confusing free speech for the U.S. Constitution. This only applies to American speech, and only a narrow kind of speech. When someone on the internet describes or discusses "free speech," they are typically discussing something far broader.

DDG has the right to provide poor search results. Users here are lamenting that fact.

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

#442

Post by InvisibleUp »

somenameforme wrote: post #143
chinchilla2020 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any links to this? I would love to watch some old videos from that time.

Not videos, but these two articles played a formative role in my worldview (related to Iraq): WaPo: "Irrefutable" : https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/2003/02/06/i... NYTimes: "Irrefutable and Undeniable" : https://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/06/opinion/irrefutable-and-u... I find it extremely interesting to occasionally reread those knowing what we know now. And nothing has changed, except for now there is…

It's worth noting that both of those examples were from the opinion section. Those aren't intended or required to be objective truth. And even then, they're just commenting on what Congress's position was at the time.

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

#443

Post by freediver »

danShumway wrote: post #426
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…

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 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.

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

#444

Post by CactusOnFire »

danShumway wrote: post #426
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…

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…

You're right. Fundamentally, there is no unbiased search engine. Ranking results by definition innately creates a bias.

(To be a pedant on my own post: I guess you could do a search engine that collates all search results relating to a keyword and then just shows you a random one first, but I doubt that's what the people want).

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

#445

Post by Arnavion »

moltke wrote: post #374
helen___keller wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does work for that. For a large number of searches, on relatively uncontroversial topics, search engines have effectively become oracles of truth. 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.l…

>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...

And this example https://i.imgur.com/UkcR945.png that's still broken as it was half a year ago. ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27622613 )

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

#447

Post by hereforphone »

mardifoufs wrote: post #398
empthought wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The BBC is literally the UK state media.

You ignored the "slave state with an absolute monarchy" part I think. Not like they are even comparable, unless you are saying the BBC journalists could justifiably be fearing for their lives if they criticize the UK government? All state media aren't created equal, and aren't equally independant. Otherwise the BBC, aljazeera and RT would be all equal since they are all state media after all.

Have you remembered to renew your BBC license this year?

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

#448

Post by Minor49er »

burnished wrote: post #123
deltarholamda wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

So like, what, everyones keeping this big secret and its just schlubs like you and me kept in the dark?

It doesn't need to be a secret. If you have a megaphone that everyone hears all the time, you will simply have more influence than people who whisper quietly.

6 companies dominate the media [1] which together make up at least 90% of all media [2]. Note that this isn't limited to just news.

[1] https://www.fool.com/investing/stock-market/market-sectors/c...

[2] https://tacomacc.libguides.com/c.php?g=599051&p=4586162

Also, you might find this video either amusing or alarming

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fHfgU8oMSo

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

#449

Post by hedora »

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.

Funny how most of the comments here are complaining about how this proves there is western media bias.

One of the main goals of the current Russian propaganda push in the US is to get people to lose confidence in reliable news outlets. They want us to believe that our best news outlets are equivalent to their basement troll farms that just fabricate stories day in and out.

The two are not the same.

Giving equal per story weight to misinformation spammers is equivalent to letting those spammers censor the rest of the media. Is that really what you want duck duck go and other western sites to do?

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

#450

Post by freediver »

CactusOnFire wrote: post #444
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…

You're right. Fundamentally, there is no unbiased search engine. Ranking results by definition innately creates a bias. (To be a pedant on my own post: I guess you could do a search engine that collates all search results relating to a keyword and then just shows you a random one first, but I doubt that's what the people want).

The source and purpose of the bias matters for a search engine. One thing to be biased against duplicate content and stuffed keywords, another thing is to have bias against blue widgets because the CEO of the company does not like blue widgets.
Post reply on HN