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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”

#841

Post by soundnote »

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.

Not the government, and they won't lose their lives for it, but they do live in a country that records "non-crime hate incidents" and shows them to people requesting your criminal record.

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

#842

Post by soundnote »

uejfiweun wrote: post #3

I like DDG, but honestly, this is a really bad move. It is already harder for me to find certain sites in the rankings. I mean look at this, even searching for "drudge" doesn't even bring up a link to Drudge Report: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=drudge&t=h_&ia=web I liked DDG because it respected the user. Limiting what I can see in order to make sure I don't see "Russian disinformation" seems to me like the exact opposi…

Went with Brave, I like the effort of building their own index.

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

#843

Post by Nursie »

soundnote wrote: post #837
Nursie wrote: post #819

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is nonsense. If the opposing viewpoint can’t even be put across due to the threat of jail time, you only get one. Whatever manipulation you feel occurs in other systems, outright suppression of dissenting opinion is worse, for the individual and for accuracy of information.

Such as social media banning the Hunter Biden story just before the election and suspending the New York Post's account?

Boohoo, the social media companies decided what they wanted published on their platform. I am so oppressed.

No, not such as that, because there are other places you can talk about it and reporters are free to report it in their own publications.

Meanwhile in Russia, mentioning things that go against the official line gets you actually imprisoned for years.

Get a grip. You are not being oppressed. You may need to spend less time consuming social media though, and realise that what facebook or twitter allow is not the whole world, just a noisy subset. You are allowed to post your hunter biden conspiracy theories elsewhere, you can even stand up your own website and post it all there, and the worst that will happen is people will laugh at you. In Russia you are not.

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

#844

Post by soundnote »

tyler_sf wrote: post #716
hfsh wrote: post #615

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I liked DDG because it respected the user. Unless you were searching for anything recipe-related, in which case they will push results from their partner 'yummly'. Or if you were trying to get literal result from you search string, which it will apparently silently ignore if it doesn't find enough results. Honestly, I'll dump DDG in a heartbeat whenever I find something even marginally better. Their only edge is th…

>Their only edge is the '!' syntax which I haven't yet bothered to find an independent solution for. I simply mimic that bang behavior using my browser's ability to add custom searches. It's a slight pain to set up on a fresh install because of all the extra addresses I manually plug in but once done, I'm not necessarily tied to any search engine. If you're in Chromium you can right-click on the address bar and see t…

Firefox can sync those keywords via bookmarks, but the feature's deprecated and not supported on mobile anymore, as expected.

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

#845

Post by soundnote »

kkjjkgjjgg wrote: post #459
Imnimo wrote: post #290

Suppose I go off and make a search engine, with my own algorithm for ranking search results. At first it works great. And then five years later, I find that, by a quirk in my algorithm, I find that a new site has risen to the top of all my results. This new site was created as a prank, and it contains authoritative-sounding but incorrect answers to common questions. The results returned are still relevant to my users…

I'd say a good search engine should try to deliver the results the user is looking for. Simple as that. It probably can never be perfect, as the search engine can only guess what the user is looking for. But it can try to do its best. There is no rule that it should rank sites by page rank or number of keywords or whatever. If I don't want to see "Russian Disinformation", I probably won't search for it to begin with.…

The problem is that the definition of disinformation isn't really about accuracy - it's mostly "what is (woke) California prepared to accept". For example, most of the coronavirus "disinfo" bans have been handed out on a basis of roughly like "is this useful for the goal of making people adhere to covid policy?" If you say vaccines won't prevent transmission before Cali is okay with it, byebye, even though the statement has always been accurate. It just hasn't been part of blue California's story until lately. Talking about lab leak? It's okay now, but has gotten people banned for the last couple years.

So what will "Russian disinfo" be like? It's hard to even know what the facts are since truth is the first casualty of war.

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

#846

Post by native_samples »

inopinatus wrote: post #810
native_samples wrote: post #740

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 disc…

I understand the philosophy of science just fine. The problem with Nature articles is not that they are mostly right but a little bit wrong around the edges in ways other scientists will soon refine. The problem is they are often no better than science fiction. They are wrong, wrong at their core, the authors and editors know they are wrong and nobody cares because the conclusions are ideologically useful. It's not specific to Nature of course. Science as a whole has a massive problem with such papers. Way too many researchers/academics like to blow this problem off as just the normal scientific process - it's not.

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

#847

Post by soundnote »

endymi0n wrote: post #241
somenameforme wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Interesting, seems like the Russian „Firehose of Falsehoods“ model seemed to work pretty well on a sizeable demographic of even HN to make them distrust anything: https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE198.html I‘m not saying I‘m blindly following either sides‘ narrative, but to me there is a clear trustworthyness hierarchy between the narrative of a society where I can still freely read, discuss and criticize thes…

A society that changes its narrative every otver day sounds like America. And it is becoming less free by the day, though less by government coercion and more due to private actors falling in line behind ideology and the idea that neutrality is not just overrated, but wrong and immoral.

That the punishment is not prison but people going after your job (and often succeeding at it, and people thinking such thibgs are ok) doesn't mean the society is free.

Contrast a society where the government executes you for being gay, where it throws you in prison and a society where everyone looks at you funny and your family disowns you. The degree of coercion differs in all, but are gay people fully free in any?

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

#848

Post by soundnote »

ars wrote: post #163
eli wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't seem incompatible. I assume most people searching for general news about Ukraine are not seeking for Russian state media's take on it.

They should though. There's no other way to understand this war. Like, to an outsider it's mistifying why Putin is doing this, but even more mystifying why Russia is letting him - reading the news from their POV helps you understand that. Without understanding that, you can't really understand how the war is going, or what the end game is. Western news mostly just wants to tell you about atrocities, and how wonderful…

https://twitter.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1498491107902062592

You could listen to Western sources and understand the Russian perspective much better than the breathless confusion in a lot of media.

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

#849

Post by soundnote »

ColinHayhurst wrote: post #170
cato_the_elder wrote: post #162

Based on this, if you have a distaste for censorship, you probably should use Brave Search instead of DuckDuckGo. [1] Also, if you are using DuckDuckGo to avoid gargantuan corporations, you should know that they are essentially Bing with some extra perks. Brave Search has its own index, it only falls back to Bing when it doesn't have enough results (which they claim happens only for a minority of queries). [1]: https…

Falls back to Google actually and semi-independent as explained here: https://seirdy.one/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-indexe...

Google fallback is opt-in, Bing fallback is automatic.

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

#850

Post by soundnote »

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.

Freedom of speech is a philosophical principle. Laws based on the philosophy have been written, but they are not the broader principle itself. The laws are just one instance of the principle.

So when we criticize a private actor for going against freedom of speech, we are not saying that they break the law, or that they aren't allowed to do what they do. They plainly are.

What we are saying is that we like the principle, and would like to see the private organization act so as to uphold the principle. This is especially true if they have advertised themselves as being pro the principle before but have backtracked since.

A huge part of DDG's position before was to escape your results being shaped for you by the search provider. Now DDG is doing that on top of whatever Bing does. Maybe they're just complying with EU sanctions that demand suppressing RT and Sputnik, but I haven't really seen/checked other communications by them on the subject.

EDIT: There's also the issue of determining what is factual and what is misinformation on a contested subject. Not easy, especially algorithmically, and something I'd rather do myself.

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