[HN Gopher] DuckDuckGo "down-rank sites associated with Russian ...
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DuckDuckGo "down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation"
Author : thallium205
Score : 346 points
Date : 2022-03-10 15:22 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| andrew_ wrote:
| Prior submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30624320
|
| Brave Search has been gradually improving and I'm pleased with
| the quality of their results as of late. I encourage folks to
| give it a spin.
| criddell wrote:
| You might want to give Kagi a try. I've been using it for a few
| weeks and I think it's better than Google for my needs.
| andrew_ wrote:
| Thanks, Will definitely give it a shot.
| 2-718-281-828 wrote:
| DDG is already censoring. You won't f.x. find sanctioned-
| suicide.org when searching for "sanctioned suicide". But you can
| search that forum via the site keyword. Google completely removed
| that forum from its results.
|
| It's hard to say - I suppose - what that tweet means practically.
| F.x. searching for "ukraine bio weapon laboratories". Will there
| be any sites discussing this without just dismissing it? And if
| yes, how deep are they buried?
| (https://twitter.com/i/status/1501306485183295488)
| drno123 wrote:
| 4 years ago I switched from Google to DDG, only occasionally
| using !g switch.
|
| This is a bad move by DDG.
| xdennis wrote:
| This is a very good move on DDG's part. You can't have free
| information during a war.
|
| It would be wrong during peace, but we can't afford this during
| the Russian rampage that's happening right now.
| kweingar wrote:
| To shamelessly steal a comment from the user president:
|
| Would you be okay with media censoring content that opposed the
| Japanese internment because it was wartime during WW2?
| hidden-spyder wrote:
| Why not provide a toggle that allows unfiltered results for those
| who want that?
|
| This way, they can both filter out propaganda away from those who
| might be vulnerable and still let those who want it have it.
| awb wrote:
| Maybe call it "controversial" similar to Reddit.
| supergirl wrote:
| when shit hits the fan, the West is no better than a
| dictatorship. it's only a fluffy democracy when there is no
| danger and the war is far away. we got the "free" media blasting
| every line from the government without any scrutiny and social
| media silently censoring and re-ranking posts to fit the central
| party's narrative.
| shmoe wrote:
| I tried DDG for a few weeks... Google is still better, even
| though its as bad as it's ever been. Really need some disruption
| here.
| pessimizer wrote:
| DDGs search has gotten worse as it has gotten more active. I
| don't know this to be true, but it seems like their old search
| results felt too Wild West for prime time to them, so before
| they began the radio/tv/billboard ad blitz they changed things
| on the backend for the worse.
| c7DJTLrn wrote:
| And so we come back to the eternal question: who decides between
| information/disinformation and what are their biases?
| Markoff wrote:
| Yandex was already my go to alternative to Google, this just
| reassured me in my choice
| jdrc wrote:
| Was there a particular issue with people searching and ending up
| on russian propaganda? I guess the ones who did will still do. In
| any case it may not seem so but we are at war with USSR v2, at
| least that s what russia is doing so it helps to keep some
| perspective here. As long as media is ran by people they will
| have censorship/bias and there will be no absolute free speech,
| as it s pretty clear that the most dictatorial regimes make heavy
| use of internet propaganda. Still, i think those things are more
| like PR moves, and maybe not overall positive: Russian propaganda
| is transparent, vicious and unashamed
| ColinHayhurst wrote:
| Is there any statement from Microsoft since or beyond that from
| Feb 28 where they mention de-ranking search results from two news
| sites, on Bing?
|
| https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2022/02/28/ukraine...
| paxys wrote:
| Judging by the replies to this thread, I don't think anyone here
| knows what an algorithm is. How do you think any search engine on
| the planet "objectively" decides how to show you the top 10
| results for a search term out of billions of possibilities? There
| are a thousand knobs constantly being turned behind the scenes
| depending on the preferences of the operator. "Non-biased search
| results" are impossible by definition.
| Camas wrote:
| Unbiased search is impossible, so DDG should be deliberately
| biased?
| bobobob420 wrote:
| 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 article
| could be the most relevant article even if every word in the
| article is a lie. Also what if you are specifically looking for
| disinformation? Now you can't use the search engine properly.
| If they are such transparent kings give us the option ourselves
| to press the button to filter russia out but they wont because
| they know we will do a diff and expose the political bias
| awb wrote:
| 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
| guessing.
| bobobob420 wrote:
| They are censoring russia and it is wrong in the global
| scheme of what the internet is supposed to give us access
| too. We are going backwards with this bullshit. Educate
| people dont hide stuff from them, its annoying
| paxys wrote:
| And what if the user is _not_ specifically looking for
| propaganda? If I search for "Ukraine war", the top result
| can be CNN or Ukraine News or RT. The engine operator has to
| decide which one of these to show me. What is the objectively
| correct option according to you?
| high_pathetic wrote:
| Right now I consider any news from the conflict area with a huge
| heap of salt.
|
| But this move is a bad PR move by DDG. I don't need handhelding
| by a fucking search engine.
| Madmallard wrote:
| How about no? Pathetic from DDG. If you work there you should be
| ashamed of yourself. I will find a new search provider that
| doesn't decide which political content I can see.
| IYasha wrote:
| So, once again, no one is neutral. Companies decide who's bad and
| what's true. I'm not pro-trumpist, but a few years ago it hurt
| pretty bad, and it continues.
| Lio wrote:
| I'm OK with this.
|
| Given that it was a KGB policy to mess with the truth[1] I think
| it's fine to try to inoculate yourself from it.
|
| 1. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IQPsKvG6WMI
| cato_the_elder wrote:
| 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://nitter.net/BrendanEich/status/1501978488043020292#m
| ColinHayhurst wrote:
| Falls back to Google actually and semi-independent as explained
| here: https://seirdy.one/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-
| indexe...
| cato_the_elder wrote:
| Thanks for the interesting link. It might be slightly
| outdated about Brave Search though. In the tweet I linked to
| above they say:
|
| > For <10% of queries where we don't have good results, we
| rely on Bing presently, so that fallback could be censored.
| balozi wrote:
| As soon as Brave has more than a handful of users, they will
| quickly metamorphize into their Do Evil phase. We are currently
| watching that transformation at DDG. The point is that there is
| no place left to turn to.
| madsbuch wrote:
| What if my intend was to find the Russian misinformation?
| B1FF_PSUVM wrote:
| "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that."
| cosmiccatnap wrote:
| Alir3z4 wrote:
| DDG is done for me.
| luhego wrote:
| That's why I will keep using google. If I will use an orwellian
| search engine, at least I will use the original one.
| awb wrote:
| Ask HN:
|
| What queries are you using on DDG about Russia/Ukraine that are
| not returning the results you're wanting?
|
| And is Google providing better results?
| xnx wrote:
| DDG is a thin wrapper around Bing that makes it worse.
| [deleted]
| CyanBird wrote:
| So, how does this make any sense for ddg?
|
| I don't get it, I really don't
|
| Why would they self sabotage like this? Ever?
| pessimizer wrote:
| Maybe honest nationalism/"patriotism", maybe a phone call or a
| meeting with a VIP, maybe both.
|
| Sometimes you can get as rich purposefully trashing a product
| as you can taking it to a moderate success. Look at Firefox.
| malwarebytess wrote:
| Looks like DDG and I are breaking up. I used DDG precisely to get
| around this kind of manipulation -- i can make my own
| assessments.
|
| What good alternatives are there even left these days?
| justnotworthit wrote:
| Wasn't DDG a privacy layer on bing? Does bing do this?
| kats wrote:
| DuckDuckGo is Bing, we know this because when Bing accidentally
| censored all image searches for "tank man", all image results
| disappeared from DuckDuckGo as well.
|
| Bing already announced that they were doing this, so maybe
| DuckDuckGo doesn't have any choice about it.
|
| https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/microsoft-rem...
|
| > The company said it would not display any state-sponsored RT
| and Sputnik content, de-rank their search results on Bing and not
| place any ads from its ad network on those sites.
| decadancer wrote:
| How exactly is it bing? Refaced and operated by microsoft?
| Refaced and scrapped results from bing? Any more info on this?
| Skiiing wrote:
| When you do a search on DuckDuckGo, they query Bing using an
| API and show the results that Bing return. DuckDuckGo is
| mostly Bing with some extra "value-added" embellishments.
| latexr wrote:
| > Any more info on this?
|
| https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-
| pages/results/so...
|
| > We also of course have more traditional links in the search
| results, which we also source from multiple partners, though
| most commonly from Bing (and none from Google).
| latexr wrote:
| > DuckDuckGo is Bing, we know this because when Bing
| accidentally censored all image searches for "tank man", all
| image results disappeared from DuckDuckGo as well.
|
| We know it because they're open about it. The information was
| public before that incident.
|
| https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so...
| jaywalk wrote:
| > maybe DuckDuckGo doesn't have any choice about it.
|
| Did you read the linked tweet?
|
| "At DuckDuckGo, we've been rolling out search updates that
| down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation."
|
| Sounds like they very much had a choice, and chose censorship.
| If they didn't and are actually just subject to Bing's whims,
| then they're lying. Neither of those are good.
| kats wrote:
| Yeah but just thinking about how this would work. For sites
| like DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, or Yahoo search, they don't have
| hundreds of engineers maintaining their own search engines,
| they must just call some Bing API. The Bing API must return
| the search results already ranked. (Otherwise what would be
| the alternative?) So the down-ranking of russian sites would
| happen upstream of DuckDuckGo.
| empthought wrote:
| >chose censorship
|
| This is not what the word "censorship" means.
| mardifoufs wrote:
| Implementing a context based downranking policy on the
| results when they use a search engine (Bing) over which they
| probably have almost 0 ability to tweak or fine tune before
| the query sounds like an incredibly hard thing to do. You'd
| have to do a lot of contextual analysis and understand not
| only the query but also all the results the API gives you,
| _after_ the search is already done. That seems even more
| complicated than just having your own search algorithms at
| that point.
|
| It's possible but it's hard to believe they'd go through that
| effort and coincidentally come up with something very similar
| to what Bing started doing too. I don't want to assume they
| are lying but this can very well be just an attempt at free
| PR when the truth could be just that it wasn't their decision
| at all. ddg does not seem to be very upfront over their
| almost total reliance on Bing in the first place.
|
| I mean IIRC when the tank man picture disappeared from bing
| and thus from DDG too, duckduckgo acknowledged the problem
| but it didn't seem like they could do anything about it but
| wait until Bing fixes the issue.
| throwaway111023 wrote:
| Thanks DDG, time to try a different search engine. I was always
| doing !g anyway.
| [deleted]
| boplicity wrote:
| Most of the comments here seem to have the same basic
| misconception. They think it is possible to act without bias.
| This is simply not possible -- even algorithms have bias.
|
| For example, machine learning based on a human dataset will learn
| the human biases. This is well documented.
|
| Instead of aiming for no bias -- it is better to explicitly
| outline one's biases, as well as how one is responding to those
| biases (or not).
|
| The unfortunate situation, is that companies like DuckDuckGo,
| Google, etc, would like you to believe that they present
| "unbiased" results, despite the literal impossibility of this.
| Much better to make any and all biases explicit, so that nobody
| is deceived.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > Instead of aiming for no bias ...
|
| It's not all or nothing. You can both minimize bias and
| explicitly outline biases.
| nimbius wrote:
| Its really shocking to me just how many western companies have
| capitulated to the wholesale censorship and shunning of Russia
| for this war.
|
| DDG and others snored through the bush era disinformation
| campaign that led to the war in Iraq that killed countless
| civilians, yet somehow have a sterling enough moral terpitude to
| suddenly care about truth now?
| doitLP wrote:
| To be fair DDG was founded the year Obama took office.
| conartist wrote:
| So twitter and facebook getting down-ranked?
| JohnDeHope wrote:
| My question is: DDG is to Google, as ___ is to DDG. What is ___?
| TehShrike wrote:
| I recently discovered Kagi and got into the beta in the last
| week. So far I've been happy with the results.
|
| https://kagi.com/
|
| I haven't been very happy with my ability to find things with
| DDG or Google lately, if Kagi can deliver good search results,
| I'll happily pay whenever they go out of beta
| jcadam wrote:
| Google.
| rank0 wrote:
| Wow. Fuck this so much. I'm never using ddg again. I think I'm
| going to move towards searching specific sites rather than using
| a generic internet-wide search provider.
| blub wrote:
| Frankly I'd find it much more acceptable to label so-called
| sources of misinformation and link to the evidence of their past
| transgressions. This is the only measure which is respectful of
| the kind of free exchange of ideas typical of a democratic
| society.
|
| That so so many jump directly to banning, silencing, downranking
| tells me that we're already in big trouble, as evidenced also by
| the heavy-handed coronavirus-related censorship, cancelling
| people, etc.
| jawerty wrote:
| One problem with platforms having a clear bias in their search
| results is their classification of concepts like "disinformation"
| aren't what they say. They can't be. A business that needs to
| increase profits every quarter is never going to be charitably
| filtering data to get rid of "bad actors" (unless it's enforced
| by the law), they're going to do what they can to make more
| money. I don't think the owners of DDG are making this mistake
| maliciously. However, controlling information based on subjective
| opinions on narratives like the Russia/Ukraine conflict (which
| 99% of people talking about haven't even been to the region) is
| short sighted unless they're openly stating "We have a clear bias
| and are making our own claims on what good information is."
| awglkjl34kj wrote:
| bumblebritches5 wrote:
| lizardactivist wrote:
| avgcorrection wrote:
| The war is two weeks old and some people seem to want to inject
| the news from Ukraine straight into their veins. That also makes
| it easier for disinformation and propaganda to spread. Both sides
| have an incentive to spread propaganda (although moreso for
| Russia since this is not a righteous war on their part by any
| stretch of the imagination).
|
| The Wikipedia page for the Ghost of Kyiv currently says that some
| sources claim that it is "an urban legend or war propaganda".
| "Urban legend" is the most frequent name that I've seen. It would
| have been called "disinformation" if it had been fighting on the
| Russian side.
|
| I doubt that most Western sources will be as critical of
| falsehoods coming from the Ukrainian and Western side compared to
| the Russian side. If the Ukrainian/Western side gets labeled as
| simply "false" (intent unclear) while the falsehoods coming from
| the Russian side gets labeled as "disinfo" then I would imagine
| that DDG could downplay Russian falsehoods while leaving up
| Ukrainian/Western falsehoods.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| The label "disinformation", like "terrorism" often depends on
| your individual context. "War propaganda" is a pretty accurate
| descriptor for that silly story. War propaganda isn't always
| meant strictly to misinform. Consider the "Eating carrots is
| good for your eyesight" trope produced by UK propaganda during
| WWII. One of it's goals was to cover up the success of radar in
| night conditions, but it also had the goal of encouraging
| citizens to grow more carrots in their victory gardens.
| Hilariously, retrospectively it can't even be called
| disinformation anymore because carrots DO contain a compound
| that is necessary for your eyes to operate in a healthy manner
| Tainnor wrote:
| Most Western media that I follow are very quick to point out
| that information from Ukraine is not necessarily trustworthy.
| They're quite likely to portray the situation in a way that
| makes it look like they're winning. The number of reported
| Russian casualties is very likely to be exaggerated and this is
| pointed out rather consistently.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| My own state media frequently figure Zelinsky's words on the
| front page/quoted on the news. Passed on uncritically.
| giaour wrote:
| Lot of hot takes and hostility in these comments, which is
| honestly kinda surprising.
|
| If your reaction to this news is negative, ask yourself, should
| DuckDuckGo downrank SEO spam? Then ask yourself how
| disinformation written to "go viral" on social media and in
| search results is different from SEO spam.
| pphysch wrote:
| SEO spam is... spam. No one wants spam, and usually has obvious
| indicators of SEO manipulation.
|
| Q: Who determines what is "Russian disinformation?"
|
| A: Teams of "specialists" funded by the US/UK governments
| (Bellingcat, Atlantic Council, etc).
| gibrown wrote:
| The people writing the search algorithms decide, just like
| they decide what a "good" algorithm is.
| pphysch wrote:
| I would bet you $50 that DDG was handled/requested a
| blocklist of domains from a spooky US/UK govt associate and
| did not unilaterally create it themselves.
| giaour wrote:
| Your assertion is not falsifiable, but I would otherwise
| take the other side of that bet.
| mardifoufs wrote:
| Its exactly what happened to Qwant so it's not far
| fetched.
| pphysch wrote:
| Sure it is. We can ask @yegg about their methodology
| bobobob420 wrote:
| That is most likely what happened and the naivety around
| it is annoying.
| giaour wrote:
| ... are you saying Russian disinformation does not have
| obvious indicators of SEO manipulation? That would be a
| pretty big change for them.
| pphysch wrote:
| Yes
|
| ... Unless your "indicator" is "deviates from the
| Washington narrative", which is _totally_ ridiculous.
| giaour wrote:
| I don't know what you're basing that last sentence on.
| Disinformation is infamous for leveraging black-hat SEO
| techniques. CF for example https://policyreview.info/arti
| cles/analysis/disinformation-o...
| adamrezich wrote:
| ask yourself why this particular variety of disinformation
| written to "go viral" on social media and in search results is
| different from any other. ask yourself whether your own state's
| government ever engages in similar activity, or whether this is
| something that only this specific state government in question
| does. ask yourself why other people making decisions about what
| kinds of propaganda you do and don't see is good for you and
| ultimately society as a whole. ask yourself why information
| flow on the Internet is becoming increasingly restricted and
| censored, and how we got to the point where Internet users seem
| to actively demand such restrictions and censorship, when it
| most certainly wasn't this way in the past.
| giaour wrote:
| Did DDG say they're upranking "good" propaganda and
| downranking "bad" propaganda? What I understood from the
| tweets is that DDG is downranking propaganda. Russia happens
| to produce a lot of it, so they'd be more impacted.
| pessimizer wrote:
| No, what they said is that they're downranking "sites
| associated with Russian disinformation", not "propaganda."
| If what you understood is different than that, it's
| different that what the tweet directly says.
| giaour wrote:
| Source reputation is an important heuristic for
| determining whether a given piece is content is likely to
| be spam. If a web property is demonstrated to be
| routinely publishing falsehoods to sway public opinion,
| you don't think that should factor into a site's
| reputation score?
| adamrezich wrote:
| what is and is not propaganda is subjective. something your
| state government tells you that you take for granted to be
| true may in fact be propaganda. but in the absence of a
| Universal Propaganda Detection Algorithm, whether or not
| something is propaganda is up to personal interpretation.
| giaour wrote:
| We're arguing the same point, I think. The GP was arguing
| against a straw man that only one kind of spam should be
| downranked.
| gibrown wrote:
| Exactly. Every search algorithm requires making judgements
| about how and what to rank. Explicitly marking sites as
| "disinformation"/"spam"/"seo" is exactly a part of building a
| good global web search.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| Info from both sides are supposed to go viral. Why does that
| part matter?
| giaour wrote:
| What matters is that SEO spamming techniques are used to
| force it to go viral. It's not about sides, though one side
| in this conflict uses spam much more than the other.
| cycomanic wrote:
| Thank you! This really needed to be said. This is about
| political SEO Spam nothing else.
| freediver wrote:
| This would not be a problem if all SEO spam was treated the
| same. But in this case DDG would only consider disinformation
| coming from one side as "SEO spam" thus making a political
| stance and not a search quality stance, which would consider
| all disinformation equally (leaving aside the question how
| would DDG even be able to tell what is disinformation in the
| first place)
| Splatter wrote:
| Seems like there would be an opening here for DDG to create a
| separate section (if they're insistent on this disinformation
| down-rank path) to publish a clear and falsifiable algo their
| systems use to determine disinformation and also an option to
| view those results that are down-ranked as a result of the algo.
| boplicity wrote:
| Maybe this won't be a popular opinion here -- but it seems to me
| that there _should_ be a search engine that _actively_ acts with
| _intentional bias_ to weed out publishers and websites that,
| according to that search engine 's standards, simply aren't worth
| listing in their search engine.
|
| Kind of a hybrid search engine, and curated list of websites.
|
| Google set the standard by trying to make _everything_
| algorithmic. I can 't help but think that most people would be
| served better if there was a search engine in the market that
| actively curated the listings.
|
| I'm not saying that such a search engine should be the _only_
| option, but I do think that it could be a valuable addition to
| the search landscape.
| ricardo81 wrote:
| True, but very specific human intervention is very different to
| web scale algorithms. The algorithms are to an extent beyond
| accountability at a human level, but human intervention isn't.
|
| Google is known to have 10's of thousands of "quality raters"
| for web pages. But they follow an algorithm. They will still
| have their own biases though. Not every one of them will rate
| pages the same.
|
| The lines are very muddy for sure, but to say "I don't like
| this country and what it's saying and we're actively going to
| demote content ... somehow... " is the kind of manipulation
| that DDG users seem to be strongly disagreeing with.
| Particularly so with DDG because their entire index is Bing,
| and who knows whether they're doing the same? I would wager DDG
| does not know.
| [deleted]
| paulpauper wrote:
| terrible move, duck duck go.
| mulmen wrote:
| Just give me a "this is irrelevant to my search" button on each
| result. And a "never show me results from this domain" button
| while you're at it.
| Thorentis wrote:
| DDG doesn't trust its users enough to allow us to have an
| unbiased algorithm? I will now stop using DDG.
| plesiv wrote:
| How arogant do you have to be to consider yourself to be the
| arbiter of Truth?
|
| Do you really think that western media are propaganda free?
|
| Do you think that the western propaganda is good and Russian one
| is bad?
|
| If you're downranking disinformation from Russian side, shouldn't
| you also downrank western disinformation?
|
| Does your assesment of truthfulness really boil-down to "in-group
| good / out-group bad"? If yes, why bother reading anything, you
| already know what your conclusion is going to be.
| 13415 wrote:
| The very idea of a search engine is to filter a few useful
| pages out hundreds of thousands of pages. It's impossible to do
| that without bias and it's bizarre to think Russian
| disinformation sites could provide useful information. Not even
| Russians think that. The search engine should give the
| respective results when the user enters "Russian disinformation
| sites" or something like that, of course.
|
| On a side note, during the past two weeks Russian
| disinformation campaigns have become so awfully retarded that
| it's not even funny to browse them for entertainment anymore.
| It's just obvious bullshit, changing the tune daily because FSB
| agents no longer know what to say.
| awglkjl34kj wrote:
| topynate wrote:
| Yegg followed up with an argument about relevancy of results:
|
| "Search engines by definition try to put more relevant content
| higher and less relevant content lower -- that's not censorship,
| it's search ranking relevancy." -
| https://twitter.com/yegg/status/1501734648417865731
|
| The other premise is that Russian disinformation is irrelevant by
| virtue of being disinformation - that a user of DDG wouldn't want
| to be manipulated if he somehow knew in advance that this would
| be the effect on him. Accepting that arguendo, what about the
| user explicitly looking for what Russia has to say? I asked Yegg
| if appending "russian perspective" would give Russian
| perspectives. I don't expect a reply but it seems clear to me
| that down-ranking sites is too blunt a tool to allow for this.
| bhandziuk wrote:
| does this imply that you just need to scroll down to see the
| "Russian Perspective"?
| lucb1e wrote:
| If DDG could just start with downranking the stackoverflow
| scrapers to below actual stackoverflow (and related sites),
| thanks
| throwawaymanbot wrote:
| noyeastguy wrote:
| I support this as an avid DDG user. Russian disinformation is a
| new kind of warfare that we've not inoculated ourselves against
| yet. This is a step in that direction. "in order to maintain a
| tolerant society, the society must be intolerant of intolerance."
| OtomotO wrote:
| If you're intolerant you are not tolerant. If you only tolerate
| what you approve of, you're not tolerate at all.
|
| The definition of tolerating includes viewpoints that are not
| your own.
|
| Otherwise everyone in existence would be tolerant
| DFHippie wrote:
| You present tolerance as binary: you are tolerant or you are
| intolerant. There are degrees of tolerance. If you wish to
| foster a more tolerant society, you can refuse to tolerate
| the least tolerant people and thereby make the net level of
| tolerance in the society higher. Basically, you ban the
| bigots. Is this bigotry against bigots? No, actually, because
| bigotry is holding an unjustified negative opinion against
| someone and this would be a justified opinion, but setting
| that aside, it would result in less bigotry.
|
| And tolerating people when they behave and not tolerating
| them otherwise is different from not tolerating people
| because of innocuous characteristics which are outside their
| control, like their skin color, their gender, or their place
| of birth. You can choose not to abuse the disabled and
| thereby make yourself less bigoted. You can't choose not to
| be disabled.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| I don't see how that quote applies at all.
|
| Intolerance is something like Nazism. That's an ideology, not
| information/disinformation. You can't disprove an ideology.
|
| Take Russia's falsehood that the war is a "special military
| operation". This is a statement which is neither tolerant nor
| intolerant. We can clearly see that Russia has launched a full-
| scale operation against Ukraine, that it is unprovoked, and
| thus that it is illegal. So we can conclude that "special
| military operation" is disinformation; just a euphemism for a
| crime.
|
| A tolerant society can deal with falsehoods just fine.
| YaBomm wrote:
| TrevorJ wrote:
| There's a _huge_ assumption here, that it 's not useful to know
| or understand what Russia is saying. I'm not comfortable with
| insulating the western world from knowing what propaganda Russia
| is peddling.
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| I've said it once and I've said it again - I don't need tech
| companies to tell me what is and isn't disinformation.
| OtomotO wrote:
| Truth is the first victim of war
| bhandziuk wrote:
| Are you advocating for more news articles about how great
| Russia is for liberating the Nazi-subjugated people of Ukraine?
| gambler wrote:
| You know, I am beginning to see that all that talk about mass
| psychosis caused by social isolation due to Covid and lockdowns
| was onto something. It explains a lot of what is happening right
| now. People are hyper-focused on only one thing and pay zero
| attention to long-term and larger-context consequences of their
| actions. And proud of it.
| wrycoder wrote:
| Not only that, but I'm observing lately that Western culture is
| becoming increasingly juvenile and generally lacking in wisdom,
| apparently by deliberately forgetting the past.
| president wrote:
| Because social media gave literal juveniles power in numbers
| whereas in real life their opinions would have been largely
| ignored. On social media, you don't know if you're talking to
| a high-schooler, a bot, or a state sponsored troll. Yet their
| opinion is essentially weighted the same as a PhD scholar.
| lamontcg wrote:
| In the past you'd get your information via your city
| newspaper, maybe the NYT/WSJ or another national newspaper if
| you strived to be "well informed" and then your choice of the
| NBC/ABC/CBS nightly news because cable didn't exist yet. The
| filters in front of the bulk of the population were much
| stronger then.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| I have no idea what all of the talk about mass psychosis is
| even trying to say and the video about it that went viral feels
| a bit...manufactured?
| awb wrote:
| I'm sure there's a term for it, but it's saying something
| that could be true without providing data or any
| accountability kind of like a horoscope.
|
| "People seem much more X than they did Y years ago."
|
| The power of suggestion makes you start noticing all the
| examples of X in the last Y years.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| That's the exact feeling I got from it. It says nothing and
| can be broadly applied to anything with philosopher quotes
| sprinkled in.
|
| The comments also seemed less than genuine and the source
| of the material is anonymous.
| vincentmarle wrote:
| Can we also start down-ranking Fox News, Breitbart and other
| disinformation sites just in time for the 2022/2024 elections?
|
| Asking for a friend.
| ckw wrote:
| Russian propaganda includes most of the strongest valid
| criticisms of US propaganda. US propaganda does not.
| xg15 wrote:
| While there is absolutely an enormous amount of
| misrepresentations or plain lies pushed by russian outlets, I'm
| worried that there might be too much temptation to use the
| current climate to control the narrative and label anything
| inconvenient as "disinformation".
|
| I remember reading a few days ago a warning that cyber attacks of
| german government agencies are to be expected in the near future
| and that attackers could use the obtained knowledge in
| disinformation campaigns.
|
| Of course enemy psyops could always use leaked information as a
| "grain of truth" to make a fabricated message seem more credible
| - however, I think if any kind of leaked classified information
| is automatically termed "disinformation", we went too far. At
| least, in such a climate, I don't know how something like the
| Snowden leaks would have been possible.
| wnevets wrote:
| Anyone upset about down ranking propaganda need to get their
| priorities straight. Why would you want to use a search engine
| that serves intentionally bad information?
| mywittyname wrote:
| Right. The problem with every "free" system is that is it will
| be eventually exploited by bad actors for fun and profit. At
| first, people were exploiting SEO to make money, now they are
| using it to gain power and influence.
| skilled wrote:
| I don't give a shit either way. But, damn, this backfired pretty
| bad for DDG.
| hereforphone wrote:
| And DuckDuckGo has just lost it's only distinguishing feature
| (attempted neutrality).
| h2odragon wrote:
| Can we hope this will lead to some transparency about what sites
| are donwranked; how they are misinformation or otherwise worth
| the downranking; and maybe even some insight into what facilities
| there are for weighting the rankings and how those are otherwise
| used?
| rich_sasha wrote:
| Yeah... it's probably better to show a link saying "we
| downranked [...], click here to uncensor".
|
| I think _in this particular case_ it 's a good thing as is, but
| next time I might not think that, and I'd rather have the "full
| shebang" available too.
|
| Though, from a philosophical point of view, search engines are
| supposed to find us "good" content. They try to guess our
| intentions and serve up the stuff we _should_ see. In this is a
| massive implication that search engines already make a lot of
| judgment calls; just usually along less identifiable features.
| Here they 're explicitly crafting a feature called
| "disinformation" and downgrading on that basis. But otherwise,
| is it so different to rating based on other arbitrary criteria
| that we don't even have any insight into?
| jcadam wrote:
| Goodbye, DDG.
| livinglist wrote:
| but what are the alternatives?
| pphysch wrote:
| The selling point of DDG is "pro privacy" i.e. non-
| interference with its users, now that this is shown to be BS,
| there is no reason to use it. Might as well use Google/Bing
| for bigger features... But probably something better out
| there.
| mywittyname wrote:
| Their claim is literally:
|
| > We don't store your personal information. Ever.
|
| > Our privacy policy is simple: we don't collect or share
| any of your personal information.
|
| They are absolutely maintaining their promise. There's no
| evidence on their site that they have a promise of "non-
| interference of [our] users". Whatever that means.
|
| I read through a lot of articles on spreadprivacy.com
| looking for evidence to back up your claim, and came up
| with nothing.
| prvc wrote:
| >we don't collect or share any of your personal
| information
|
| Their lawyers must have a very specific definition of
| "share" in mind, since they are definitely _exposing_
| that information via how their ad system functions.
| CyanBird wrote:
| Kagi
|
| They are in beta right now, If memory serves they will charge
| around 200usd/year
|
| I will be happy paying that to avoid all that other free
| search engine bullshit, such as this perfect example of ddg
| destroying their own ethos for.... I am not even sure what
| they are getting in return for this
| jcadam wrote:
| ESG points. Prepping for an exit?
| dominojab wrote:
| raygelogic wrote:
| how much of the uproar over this is about implementation vs
| intent? disinformation isn't worth being returned when the user
| is seeking information. like if you are looking for the health
| impacts of soda, you probably don't want coke writing your
| answers.
|
| I'm all for neutral platforms, but it feels like you either opt
| out of editorializing and end up with trash driven by SEO, or
| editorialize and marginalize some content producer or consumer.
| any play feels like a losing move from the business's
| perspective.
| dominojab wrote:
| TehShrike wrote:
| I want to use a search engine that puts all its effort into down-
| ranking sites that I'm not searching for
| atlantas wrote:
| Brilliantly stated. This is literally their one job.
| tpoacher wrote:
| I want one which doesn't decide this for me, no-matter how
| "good for me" it may be, and relies exclusively on my search
| query to decide what is most relevant.
|
| If you _really_ want to flag disinformation, I 'd be fine with
| some sort percentage reliability value or something along those
| lines, right next to the result. Preferably something that I
| can also order results by. Totally happy with a 'caveat emptor'
| clause regarding who comes up with those reliability values.
|
| But down-ranking sites by default is not how this is supposed
| to work. "It's for a 'good cause'" is not the point. It's
| always going to be for a "good cause (TM)".
|
| Besides, what's so bad about access to "disinformation"? I
| prefer being presented with bad arguments whose value I get to
| judge for myself, than being told I'm not getting all the
| arguments, only those whose value someone else decided on my
| behalf.
| chris11 wrote:
| > Besides, what's so bad about access to "disinformation"?
|
| Disinformation doesn't just try to present an alternative
| view, it also tries to drown out other viewpoints. I don't
| think it's possible to accurately and neutrally present
| search results when bad actors try to subvert rankings.
|
| I think propaganda can be interesting, I don't think it
| should be banned. But penalizing it seems fair to me. I don't
| want other searches to get flooded with clickbait.
| colordrops wrote:
| No one disagrees with this in principle. The _huge_ problem
| is that no one is capable of building a reliable propaganda
| detector, for many reasons. Furthermore, a good amount of
| propaganda comes from the "good" guys.
| OtomotO wrote:
| "Disinformation doesn't just try to present an alternative
| view, it also tries to drown out other viewpoints."
|
| So, basically what is done now by downranking
| "disinformation", right?
| michaelmrose wrote:
| If I want to know if a Foobar Baz Sedan is a good car
| then legit reviews and spam generated by paid shills
| aren't equally useful and since there is a finite time
| available to produce quality content having 1000x more
| spam will make it absolutely impossible for the real
| information to be obtained by anyone.
|
| Searching google for war in ukraine returns over 2
| billion results. It is impossible not to privilege some
| information over others. Believing that any software
| designed by people can possibly be unbiased is absolute
| misunderstanding.
| foxfluff wrote:
| > Searching google for war in ukraine returns over 2
| billion results.
|
| Google always lies about the number of results. You'll
| see the real number once you dig in. First screenshot
| shows what you get by default, second shows what you get
| after you enable "omitted results."
|
| https://imgur.com/a/pgiTYuV
| OtomotO wrote:
| We are not talking about believing if something is
| unbiased, or if something can be unbiased, we are talking
| about said something being actively biased in the name of
| "the greater good"
| TehShrike wrote:
| Exactly. If I'm searching for Russian propaganda, I should
| see Russian propaganda in my search results. If I'm searching
| for good bicycle reviews, I should see good bicycle reviews.
| axiosgunnar wrote:
| What should be shown if you search for ,,why did russia
| invade ukraine"?
| TehShrike wrote:
| analysts and historians saying "it's complicated"
| michaelmrose wrote:
| But its not complicated at all. Ukraine is every year
| more prosperous and more connected to the west and Russia
| is weakening kleptocracy led by a disconnected,
| malicious, evil dictator that fears that if it doesn't
| seize the opportunity to return to its vision of a
| greater Russia that has a seat at the table in the grand
| scheme of things that it will ultimately be subsumed by
| either the west or by its own people who see clear
| evidence of a better way so close at hand.
|
| In service of this goal it has turned first to brutal
| invasion of another nations sovereign territory and when
| this proved ineffectual to brutal mass murder of the
| Ukrainian people, war crimes, mercenaries, and assassins
| in hopes of breaking a nations people and its leaders.
|
| The complicated thing is a full analysis of why its war
| machine and intelligence is so broken as to lead them to
| believe this would lead to course of action would be
| profitable.
| jaywalk wrote:
| You're literally just spouting the West's approved
| propaganda and don't even realize it.
| older wrote:
| Ok, enlighten me. What is the real reason?
| michaelmrose wrote:
| Actually I have followed a plethora of information from
| individuals on the ground and historical information from
| multiple sources. What I have posted is as close to
| objective reality as I can obtain and I am very confident
| it its veracity.
| jaywalk wrote:
| The fact that you have information from "individuals on
| the ground" and from "multiple sources" doesn't make the
| information correct or unbiased. What you posted may as
| well have come directly from Ukrainian state media.
|
| "Putin was jealous that Ukraine was doing so much better
| than Russia, so he attacked them for no reason to bring
| them back down" is just a laughable take on the
| situation.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| It's also not what I said. I said Putin had a vision of a
| "Greater Russia" composed of the components of its former
| empire and reached out to grasp them before its declining
| strength made this impossible. This is literally what
| Putin said in prior speeches.
|
| I also said that democracies on their doorstep are a
| dangerous precedent for the serfs the kleptocrats are
| presently robbing.
| skinnymuch wrote:
| The data of the past decade doesn't show this to be the
| case. Check Ukraine with Belarus and Russia economic
| numbers. It negates your or really the west's framing.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Let us not try to discount the complexity of the Russian
| motivation for war (and no matter what they are, it's
| still morally wrong).
|
| Firstly, Ukraine was most prosperous in 2013. Even in
| recent years, Ukrainian wealth was growing more slowly
| than that of, say, Belarus. Even with sanctions, up until
| the pandemic, Russian GDP per capita PPP was increasing
| at a similar rate as with Ukraine. So it is unlikely that
| this was the only motivation, Ukraine was never on track
| to becoming more prosperous than Russia or it's
| satellites, nor even becoming relatively more prosperous
| in recent years. Indeed, Ukraine's economic system is
| pretty similar to that of Russia, and both countries have
| had similar levels of corruption by various indexes.
|
| Then, there are obviously many other possible
| motivations, neither of them were a justification alone,
| and many analysts squabble still about what they were. So
| yes, "it's complicated".
| mattwilsonn888 wrote:
| Whatever your Native State wants you to believe, of
| course.
| bsedlm wrote:
| a mix of both with a slider to parametrize the sentiment
| of the results "it's pure evil VS itls good"
|
| or I dunno... it's a near-waste of time to imagine what
| this could/should be as I'm in no poisition to build it.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| I don't regard carriage of misinformation used to justify
| genocide as morally neutral nor do I hope many others. If
| you feel existing search engines are insufficiently neutral
| towards evil you are free to start your own.
|
| Search engines results represent and will continue to
| ultimately represent a human value judgement because there
| is no mathematical answer to what is the right answer for
| what is the right set of results for this query because
| both engineers at the search engine and the pages indexed
| are adjusting their software based not on mathematical
| correctness but instead on the first parties desire to
| return humanly useful results not mathematically useful
| results and the latter's desire to be visible regardless of
| utility to the end user.
|
| If we correctly abandon neutrality as the lie it is then it
| is merely a question of whether lies that justify genocide
| have greater utility than actual facts. This is I think an
| easier question to answer.
| awb wrote:
| What is a query you would use to search exclusively for
| Russian propaganda?
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| search rt.com
|
| Now blocked in several countries.
| fuckcensorship wrote:
| > Besides, what's so bad about access to "disinformation"?
|
| This is an excellent point that doesn't get as much
| discussion as it deserves. Censorship of misinformation seems
| to be rooted in the idea that the masses cannot/should not
| have the freedom to think and discuss information freely.
|
| Also, there is a great deal of valuable insight which can be
| gained by analyzing a country's propaganda.
| diputsmonro wrote:
| Propaganda can be useful to analyze, yes. But only if you
| know that it's propaganda. Most people casually searching
| DDG are probably not aware of that. If you know enough to
| know that some news source is spreading propaganda and you
| want to study it, then you know enough to be able to access
| it directly. Propaganda _wants_ to be found, and you can
| always just go to RT yourself.
|
| Propaganda should be treated as a hazardous material. Yes,
| it can be studied, and there is value in studying it, but
| there are safety protocols that should be followed to
| protect yourself and others. Uranium is very useful and
| scientifically valuable, but it shouldn't be on the shelves
| at your local Walmart where people can stumble upon it,
| unaware of the dangers.
|
| Propaganda is an infohazard and should be treated as such;
| an information retrieval service should not surface it
| readily for a casual search.
| hackyhacky wrote:
| There is great value in analyzing propaganda if you know
| it's propaganda. The danger comes in the fact that the
| majority of people can't distinguish actual reporting from
| disinformation. That's why it gets down-ranked.
| therein wrote:
| > The danger comes in the fact that the majority of
| people can't distinguish actual reporting from
| disinformation.
|
| When you say that, this is what you sound like: > I am
| smarter than most people and it is impossible for me to
| be misinformed or have the wrong opinion. My opinions are
| right and I am never fooled into defending the wrong
| perspectives.
|
| How are your personal relationships in real life?
| fuckcensorship wrote:
| You are correct. However, the solution should be better
| education, not censorship.
| diputsmonro wrote:
| If DDG can overhaul the worldwide education system, I'm
| sure we'd all be in favor of that.
|
| But since the best solution is impossible, at least right
| now, a half measure like this seems reasonable to offer
| some amount of protection.
|
| Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. We should
| do what we can now, and keep pushing for better
| solutions. Holding out for perfection does nothing to
| help people now, or possibly ever, depending on your
| definition of "perfect".
| eli wrote:
| 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.
| ars wrote:
| 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 wonderfully Ukraine is doing against Russia.
| freediver wrote:
| Chance is that that many do, specifically if they are from
| Russia, India, China, Middle east.. so about half the world
| population?
|
| Or anyone who considers them agnostic really, wanting to hear
| information from all sides before constructing a mental model
| of the situation.
| pessimizer wrote:
| If you're interested in the war, but not interested in
| communications from the countries involved in that war,
| that's willful ignorance. The essence of the censorship of
| Russian, Chinese, and Iranian media is to keep people from
| media that they _would_ be interested in, not to help people
| avoid media they 're not interested in; people do a good job
| of that themselves.
|
| People who only want to read their government's approved
| information should download _uBlock Homeland_ while the rest
| of us read what we want.
| tylersmith wrote:
| I bet if they made uBlock Homeland branded as "ruBlock"
| people would turn using it into a status symbol.
| eli wrote:
| And if you search for communications from the countries
| involved you will still find them in DDG! They're just no
| longer on the first page of a "Ukraine news" query
| hammock wrote:
| It's not, for him and anyone else you "assume." For others,
| yes.
| [deleted]
| hajile wrote:
| I've watched US propaganda from WW2, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq,
| etc. I don't trust the US government or their news agencies
| anymore than any other propaganda. They'll pick the facts
| that support their side and mix in lies without a second
| thought.
|
| There are three truths in war: My side, their side, and the
| truth.
|
| If they feel compelled to do something, poison the well by
| marking sites as suspected Russian propaganda. Otherwise, let
| me read what I want and make up my own mind.
|
| If I wanted my search engine to play politics, I'd just use
| Google.
| chinchilla2020 wrote:
| Any links to this? I would love to watch some old videos
| from that time.
| pessimizer wrote:
| It's harder to find news from that time (that time being
| pre-internet) that isn't based in approved propaganda
| than news that is.
|
| The best thing to read about it would be Walter Lippmann
| in general, but starting with Public Opinion.
| somenameforme wrote:
| Not videos, but these two articles played a formative
| role in my worldview (related to Iraq):
|
| WaPo: "Irrefutable" : https://www.washingtonpost.com/arch
| ive/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 significant push to try to censor
| anything beyond such irrefutable sources.
| endymi0n wrote:
| 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 these obvious
| pieces of misinformation (while they stay on the record!)
| and a society that changes its own narrative every other
| day and where just mentioning the word ,,war" can lock me
| up in jail for 15 years by now.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| >to me there is a clear trustworthyness hierarchy between
| the narrative of a society where I can still freely read,
| discuss and criticize these obvious pieces of
| misinformation
|
| This no longer describes US society. We are better than
| Russia, but fall short of this description. Google
| actively delists information, including publications and
| statements from the US government and private citizens.
|
| This extends beyond "misinformation" to categorical
| topics which citizens are not allowed to learn about
| InvisibleUp wrote:
| 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.
| cato_the_elder wrote:
| > Doesn't seem incompatible.
|
| Of course they are incompatible to some extent. Otherwise,
| explicit downranking of Russian sources would be pointless.
| vernie wrote:
| Seems like a bad move, DDG is only used by terminally tech-
| brained libertarians.
| uejfiweun wrote:
| 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 opposite of respecting the user. Will
| be uninstalling soon if this intensifies.
| prvc wrote:
| >I liked DDG because it respected the user.
|
| Is there any evidence that they actually fulfilled their
| promises?
| hammock wrote:
| Drudge Report sold out to the deep state, they didn't cover
| hardly any of the election integrity news at all (among other
| editorial decisions). The rumor is Matt Drudge doesn't even own
| it anymore. If you still get your "conservative" news from
| there I suggest switching to Rantingly.
| spiderice wrote:
| I don't see the relevance. The issue is that DDG is
| intentionally preventing people from finding a website that
| they're looking for. Worst, the top result is a look-alike
| website that would confuse a lot of people in to thinking it
| is the real thing.
|
| I never get new from Drudge, but that doesn't mean I can't
| see the issue with my search engine trying to hide what I'm
| looking for from me.
| honkler wrote:
| Thanks for rantingly!
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| Yep, search is getting more and more broken...
|
| I remember all the "trump vs reporters" etc. compilations, that
| were funny... now searching for any of those terms (basically
| anything at all involving trump, or now russia) ignores almost
| everything in the searchbox, ignores all the small creators,
| just picks out the one keyword (trump/russia/putin/...), and
| show the CNN/MSNBC/... news related to that one term, and
| unrelated to other search terms in the search box.
|
| We wan't search and "sort by relevant", not by "who we think is
| right".
| orhmeh09 wrote:
| It also tends to prioritize recency a lot. Good luck
| searching for something with terms that have been in the news
| lately.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Good luck searching for someone who shares the _first name_
| of someone who has been in the news lately.
| mardifoufs wrote:
| That's if they don't disregard your query and just return
| results for whatever they deemed to be close enough. So
| if you search for Simone Something, it will just
| disregard what you wrote and just return tons of _Simon_
| Something even if there 's no shortage of results for
| your actual query! It's incredible that even when
| searching for a specific real person/name Google still
| assumes it knows better and just throw out letters
| arbitrarily. It would only be reasonable to do so if
| there are 0 results for the exact name or maybe just a
| "did you mean?" prompt for suspected typos.
|
| It never used to do that before and that's the most
| frustrating part imo
| uejfiweun wrote:
| FYI, assuming you're talking about YouTube, you can still see
| these funny compilation videos by being smart with the way
| you apply filters to the search. To be honest I am actually
| reluctant to tell you this online because I think if YouTube
| knew about this they would remove it, just like dislikes.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| Yep, youtube... but google search is not much better...
| corporate news and pinterest on top, then everything else.
| Funnily enough, sometimes the pages that scrape github
| issues get even higher than original github issues
| themselves.
| 0cVlTeIATBs wrote:
| Bilibili's search also seems to be just about as aggressive
| for videos on politically sensitive topics in China.
| snowman-yelling wrote:
| Drudge was literally the first link in my results. Haha.
| Skiiing wrote:
| Look again! The first result is "Drudge Retort", a "wrecker"
| website designed to take clicks away from the actual real
| Drudge Report.
| spiderice wrote:
| 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.
| wsgeorge wrote:
| I am shocked. I followed the link and thought I'd hit the
| Drudge Report, saw this link and had to double check. I am
| shocked.
| uejfiweun wrote:
| Weird. Maybe I got unlucky with some experiment rollout. My
| top links are Drudge Retort (some stupid parody), the link to
| the Drudge app on iPhone, and the dictionary definition for
| "drudge". Nowhere on the page is there an actual link to the
| site for me.
| mywittyname wrote:
| So is mine. But that seems accurate to me. Searching for
| 'drudge' returns drudge.com as the first result. If users
| are clicking on that link, and saying there, then that must
| be what they were looking for.
|
| Searching for "drudge report" brings up drudgereport.com.
|
| Also, after having searched for both "drudge" and "drudge
| report" several times in a row, drudgereport.com is the top
| result for both searches.
| chriscjcj wrote:
| For the last couple years, I think the Drudge Report itself
| has actually been a parody of the Drudge Report.
| beerandt wrote:
| It was sold with an nda.
| uejfiweun wrote:
| I like Drudge as an aggregator, it's a great way to see a
| "full picture" of what is going on in the world. But I do
| have some major gripes, the main one being that he
| routinely links to dog shit sources like DailyMail, The
| Sun, etc. That crap isn't news and I wish I could just
| remove all links to it from Drudge and Google results
| forever.
| bmarquez wrote:
| I clicked on that link for "drudge", the search results
| vary every time I reload the page. I always get the iOS
| app, the retort parody, and the dictionary definition as
| the top 3. But the position of all 3 links vary every time
| I click reload.
|
| Still don't see the link to the actual site either.
| choward wrote:
| > DuckDuckGo's mission is to make simple privacy protection
| accessible to all.
|
| The main job of a search engine is to give me results relevant to
| what I'm searching for. Privacy is obviously a nice feature but
| if the results suck, I'm not going to use your search engine so
| privacy doesn't matter.
|
| Who are they to decide what is "disinformation". How do they
| know? I want to see all sides of a story and come to my own
| conclusions. I don't need big tech babysitting me.
| eli wrote:
| Is this materially different from filtering other abuse like
| SEO spam? Would you choose to keep spam in your results to
| reach your own conclusion?
| cato_the_elder wrote:
| > Is this materially different from filtering other abuse
| like SEO spam?
|
| Yes it is.
|
| The undesirability of spam is much more universal than
| "misinformation", and its definition is much less
| controversial.
|
| And we don't care whether the spam is Russian, American,
| Nigerian or whatever.
|
| The motivation in this case is clearly more paternalistic
| compared to filtering spam.
| eli wrote:
| Yeah I just don't agree with any of that.
|
| Spam is infamously hard to identify and consistently
| define. My spam is your content. I'd argue what Russia is
| doing here is spam. They're laundering their message
| through media outlets with domains with much stronger SEO
| positioning than any official government domain. (You may
| disagree this is "spam" but that's kind of my point.)
|
| Meanwhile I think there's pretty broad consensus that if
| you doing a general search (and not specifically seeking
| out opposing information or alternate views) that you do
| not want the top results to be intentionally false.
| xg15 wrote:
| > _My spam is your content._
|
| Tell me of one person who _wants_ to read unsolicited
| viagra offers and all that stuff.
|
| > _I 'd argue what Russia is doing here is spam._
|
| Problem is that there are a lot of half-truths embedded
| in pro-russian media outlets and many things that, how
| false they may be, seem to be their genuine viewpoints. I
| think it would be better to engage with that stuff and
| separate the half-truths from the lies instead of simply
| hiding everything away.
| Legion wrote:
| > Who are they to decide what is "disinformation". How do they
| know?
|
| Making decisions about which information to rank highly vs.
| lowly is, you know, kind of the definition of a search engine.
| if_by_whisky wrote:
| Yeah there's a lot of "anti censorship" warriors in this
| thread, who seem confused about what search engines are for
| larvaetron wrote:
| > there's a lot of "anti censorship" warriors in this
| thread
|
| You say that as if being "anti censorship" is a weird, or
| bad thing. What reasonable person would agree that being
| "pro censorship" is an ideal stance?
| if_by_whisky wrote:
| Anti-spam utilities exist to filter out (aka "censor")
| spam. Disinformation is spam. I'm pro filtering spam and
| perhaps even a reasonable person. There you have it.
| larvaetron wrote:
| > Disinformation is spam.
|
| I believe, at a fundamental level, this statement is far
| too ambiguous to be considered a reasonable conclusion.
| OtomotO wrote:
| A search engine is for finding information.
|
| Misinformation is a kind of information.
| xg15 wrote:
| War seems to be the only situation in which it is somehow
| morally imperative to only get one side of the story...
| diego_moita wrote:
| 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
| people in danger, etc.
|
| In case someone hasn't noticed, there is a war going on in
| Europe. That is a circumstance where some of these cases apply.
|
| 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.
|
| If this sounds just like "legalese" to you consider this: a
| newspaper has the right to select and editorialize the news it
| publishes, a bookseller has the right to choose what books to
| sell, a movie theatre or a movie producer also has rights to
| choose what to exhibit or produce. The same principle applies to
| what dang does here at HN.
|
| So why shouldn't DDG have the right to choose what search results
| to display?
| uejfiweun wrote:
| You're not wrong that they absolutely have the right to choose
| what results to display. Just like Twitter has the right to
| choose what content appears on their platform, and same with
| YouTube, etc. But my opposition is not from a legal standpoint,
| it is from a moral standpoint. I just think censorship and
| cancellation is wrong and immoral, even if it is legally
| allowed. I think it is immoral for some business executive to
| make sweeping decisions about what the commoners are / aren't
| allowed to see - it opens the door to far more dystopian
| control of our society.
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| > I think it is immoral for some business executive to make
| sweeping decisions about what the commoners are / aren't
| allowed to see
|
| I used to have this point of view, but it's clear lately that
| certain types of information do not result in good outcomes
| if processed by the uneducated.
|
| The U.S. is already going in the direction of a dystopia if
| you haven't noticed. More free speech isn't going to help
| gas, housing, or educational prices, but it does enable
| various actors at little to no cost to themselves to freely
| shit out emotional, illogical, and invective dreck on various
| platforms and prevent honest analysis and discussion from
| happening on numerous issues. If all of this is a guaranteed
| benefit to society it's getting harder and harder to see to
| lately.
|
| I think the young people growing up today, who cannot afford
| a place to live, who have to go into years of debt just to
| get started, who are being looked down by previous
| generations for not starting a family when they literally
| don't have the resources to do it, are going to look at
| things vastly differently and really care less about this
| sort of thing from a hard absolute perspective.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| You had clearly already decided that all of these societal
| ills where either caused by bad information being processed
| by "the uneducated" or would be worsened by it. So this
| comment says more about how you view the uneducated than it
| says about the merits and demerits of censorship.
| sdoering wrote:
| > I used to have this point of view, but it's clear lately
| that certain types of information do not result in good
| outcomes if processed by the uneducated.
|
| I am watching a lot of historic documentaries. I studied
| history (and literature) originally. I read a lot of
| historic sources and accounts.
|
| This argument, that the powerful and educated need to
| protect the dumb masses by censoring what they are allowed
| to know/read isn't new. It is used by the powerful way
| before the medieval age but was (just to name an example)
| used by the catholic church against the translation of the
| Bible. It was used by western governments during the cold
| War. It is still used by the British government with their
| ability to silence editorial boards on specific topics. It
| was used by the US against Wikileaks. It was used by the
| GDR against their own people who also were officially
| banned from watching western TV/listen to western radio. It
| was used by western Germsn media when they decided to not
| publish the RAF terrorists' letters where they declared
| their reasoning for bombs or killings.
|
| I don't buy it in historic context and I don't buy it
| today.
| ohCh6zos wrote:
| I'm ok with this as long as I get to be the gatekeeper.
| Otherwise I would prefer we look at principles instead of
| consequences. Let's stand by our principles even if it
| dooms us.
| awb wrote:
| > I just think censorship and cancellation is wrong and
| immoral, even if it is legally allowed. I think it is immoral
| for some business executive to make sweeping decisions about
| what the commoners are / aren't allowed to see
|
| HN mods actively hide and remove content, including political
| content from sites like RT & Sputnik:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| I don't think anyone is accusing HN of censorship or making
| oppressive decisions about what the commoners can / can't
| see. It's accepted that some level of curation and guidelines
| are needed to foster a healthy environment.
|
| DDG (and HN) are not a public square, they're private
| companies conducting business according to their individual
| desires and motivations.
|
| It would be equally folly to force HN to host political
| content as it would to tell DDG how they can and can't alter
| their proprietary ranking algorithms.
|
| Censorship is really a problem when the government (or a
| monopoly) starts censoring content, with the ability to
| enforce that censorship nearly or practically universally.
| Until then, the free market will do it's work.
| empressplay wrote:
| Hacker News is not a search engine.
| awb wrote:
| It has search and I've used it as one.
| RealStickman_ wrote:
| Hacker News is a site with a specific niche audience. If
| this is your only source of news I'm afraid you're
| getting a very one-side picture on many topics. A search
| engine on the other hand is supposed to present the
| information you seek from various sources, so you can
| read different opinions.
| 12ian34 wrote:
| If you think censorship is wrong then it follows that you
| would think that the Russian state is wrong given that they
| are going as far as denying this is even a war, and actively
| censoring those that call it one. Are you saying that you're
| still keen for them to be allowed to do so?
| avgcorrection wrote:
| That's a complete derailment. This is about the experience
| that search users should have. If they want to search for
| "russia official statements ukraine" then they should get
| results about that.
|
| The fact that Russia has decided to outlaw the truth is
| completely besides the point.
| notahacker wrote:
| > The fact that Russia has decided to outlaw the truth is
| completely besides the point.
|
| It's not when we're talking about whether search results
| produced by the state which banned telling the truth
| should be given equal weight to search results by media
| which is allowed to tell the truth (even though it
| doesn't always do so) in search rankings
|
| It's not difficult to find official statements from
| Russia on the Ukraine war including via DDG, without
| going down the rabbit hole of insisting that if someone
| searches for "shelling Kyiv" there's no reason why
| websites pushing the narrative that Kyiv isn't being
| shelled shouldn't outrank news items of Kyiv being
| shelled if their SEO is good enough.
| awb wrote:
| Results on Google and DDG for that query are pretty
| similar and mostly Western sources written in English,
| responding to Russian official statements.
|
| I'd be curious if there were other search terms that had
| a clearer difference in rankings between Google and DDG
| based on this new policy.
| uejfiweun wrote:
| Yes, I say let their lies be defeated in the marketplace of
| free ideas. Basically everyone knows what's going on with
| Russia at this point. I don't think suddenly censoring
| their lies _now_ is really gonna change anything.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| People keep saying these kinds of things, but Russians
| had pretty open access to western ideas, news,
| propaganda, and history, but that didn't stop a huge
| chunk of them from either tacitly or explicitly approving
| of this invasion of a sovereign nation. People believe
| what they want to believe, not what is correct.
|
| People keep saying "sunlight is the best disinfectant"
| (despite that not even being a reasonable statement in
| terms of disinfectants) but Russians have had access to
| "sunlight" for literally decades and this still happened.
|
| It's the same with how people believed we could save
| china by exporting capitalism, as if that would change
| things. The fact of the matter is that information,
| misinformation, and propaganda are game theoretic; a
| purposely bad actor that isn't ACTIVELY pushed back
| against will have huge success.
|
| Hell, it even happens here in the states. Both Fox News
| and MSNBC are perfectly legal to produce and view here,
| and yet no matter what you say on either station, roughly
| half of the country will believe it. That's a pretty
| terrible disinfectant if you ask me.
| president wrote:
| Would you be okay with media censoring content that opposed the
| Japanese internment because it was wartime during WW2?
| mattwilsonn888 wrote:
| > Comparing a search provider to a Journalism Outlet rather
| than a Librarian.
|
| Well if you're going to start there its no surprise you reached
| the conclusion you did.
| diego_moita wrote:
| Librarians work for the state, therefore their acts are
| covered by public law that regulates censorship.
|
| DDG is a private company, therefore their acts are covered by
| private law that doesn't regulate censorship.
|
| I stated that before on my previous comment. I recommend you
| to improve your text comprehension skills, they're lacking.
| mattwilsonn888 wrote:
| Nice try. DuckDuckGo literally sold itself and became
| successful based off the promise of behaving more like a
| library than a journalist. The only thing you've pointed
| out so far is the obvious - they don't have a legal
| obligation to fulfill the premises they were built on.
| Great, as long as the free market is aware.
| andrew_ wrote:
| > So why shouldn't DDG have the right to choose what search
| results to display?
|
| Oh they absolutely should, but they aren't free from
| consequence. And users will give them feedback on how they feel
| about it by voting with their feet, or searches, lack thereof
| in this case.
| LudwigNagasena wrote:
| ricardo81 wrote:
| I don't get the comparison with newspapers, maybe 40 years ago
| that was one of the limited ways of information discovery but
| we've had the web since then. People are free to discover the
| world's information and given the saturation of that
| information, differing points of view on it. However, with two
| dominant search engines (Google and Bing/DuckDuckGo/Yahoo)
| there is little diversity and so censorship has more impact, at
| least in web discovery and navigation.
| throwmeariver1 wrote:
| The internet is probably the biggest threat democracy has
| ever faced. I am ok with your romantic point of view of the
| informed masses but it's a fallacy that in the end will cost
| us all our future. Because these people live and engage in
| extreme bubbles they get sucked into no matter if it's left
| or right. I can only urge everyone who is for total tolerance
| to read K. Poppers the "Open Society and it's Enemies" quite
| fitting from 1945.
| ricardo81 wrote:
| Not quite sure I'm following. The "romantic point of view
| of the informed masses but it's a fallacy" may apply to
| push techs like social media feeds more than search
| engines.
|
| There aren't that many universal truths when it comes to
| political situations. Asking a search engine what time of
| day it is in Tokyo, the GDP or Ghana or whatever is
| entirely more objective.
|
| I would say the onus is on people to understand sources of
| information and how to interpret them. If we're in a
| position where you're saying X% of the population will
| swallow what they search for, that makes search engines
| extremely dangerous, making the search engine an arbiter of
| truth is questionable. Does anyone at DDG have in depth
| knowledge of the political situation in Eastern Europe or
| what is truth and not? I would guess not, so they've no way
| of measuring it. It doesn't help that DDG's entire results
| are Bing's, who knows whether Bing is already pre-filtering
| them? I would guess DDG do not know that.
| throwmeariver1 wrote:
| diego_moita wrote:
| > I don't get the comparison with newspapers,
|
| The point is not newspapers "per se".
|
| The point is private entity, as opposed to public state. As I
| stated clearly, freedom of speech is a principle applied upon
| public law, not private law. Therefore, "censorship" is
| something the state does, not something private parts do
| among themselves.
|
| Are anti-spam filters "censorship"? No, because they're
| implemented by private citizens to benefit other private
| citizens.
| jhkiehna wrote:
| Censorship is not just the sole domain of a government.
| Private entities are perfectly capable of participating in
| it. You're conflating two distinct ideas.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_censorship
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Therefore, "censorship" is something the state does, not
| something private parts do among themselves.
|
| Censorship is not defined with respect to the right of free
| speech; public censorship may be where those two issues
| collide, but it's not the only kind of censorship.
| Gareth321 wrote:
| >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.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| Imagine thinking that excluding literal disinformation when
| it is not requested is a poor search result. The job of the
| search engine is to provide people the information they want.
| Not showing people lies when they want facts seems to be
| exactly the correct decision.
| hnuser847 wrote:
| > In case someone hasn't noticed, there is a war going on in
| Europe. That is a circumstance where some of these cases apply.
|
| Indeed, there's a war going on and there's a tremendous amount
| of propaganda being circulated from both sides. The question
| is, why is DDG okay with amplifying Ukranian/NATO propaganda
| and not Russian propaganda? Is it because NATO is the "good"
| guy and Russia is the "bad" guy?
|
| When the US invaded Iraq in 2003, they did so on completely
| fabricated pretenses. The amount of death and destruction the
| US inflicted on the people of Iraq was horrifying. If DDG had
| existed back then, which side should they have taken? The side
| of the violent invaders (the "good" guys) or the side of the
| Iraqis (the "bad" guys)?
|
| > So why shouldn't DDG have the right to choose what search
| results to display?
|
| Of course they have the right to choose whatever they want,
| however this move seems antithetical to their original mission.
| If I wanted US-centric state-approved search results, I could
| just use Google.
| sdoering wrote:
| I can't agree more.
|
| As a child I was brainwashed by US propaganda living on the
| western side of the Iron Curtain. The 'home of the brave and
| land of the free'. How lo g it took me to remove this naive
| Hollywood image of our friend the US from my mind.
|
| It took many long evenings of talking to actual people from
| the US while in university to learn more about the individual
| truths and lives instead of my rose tinted image.
|
| To me personally for many years now the US were the biggest
| danger to peace on this planet. Now - taking a page from
| their playbook their old arch enemy is rearing its head and
| using the frigging same arguments the US used back in Iraq to
| sow war on European soil.
|
| I am already only "allowed" (I know I can access other
| sources - it just isn't easy nor mainstream compatible) to
| watch western news.
|
| Russian propaganda is more or less banned from German viewers
| (with RT and others being banned). I am not allowed to try to
| glimpse the way Putin wants to be seen internally.
|
| And now - after Bing and Google - DDG follows suit and
| declares me too naive to be able to deal with Russian
| propaganda while still listing all the Western BS that should
| fill my head instead. Because in the end most 'news'
| currently is nothing but propaganda. Most news have an
| agenda.
|
| There is nearly no good signal. Nearly only noise.
|
| But few of the best sources to understand the mindset of the
| power elite in Russia I read in the last months were Russian
| sources read with the knowledge of the intended reason of
| publication. Aka reading it as the propaganda it is.
| kmlx wrote:
| > Russian propaganda is more or less banned from German
| viewers (with RT and others being banned).
|
| is rt.com also banned?
| sdoering wrote:
| I just tested with three providers (two mobile, one
| landline). In all three cases the requests timed out.
| ummonk wrote:
| Yes, the EU required internet providers to ban RT and
| other Russian state media. Elon Musk notably tweeted that
| Starlink was going to attempt to fight the censorship.
| codedokode wrote:
| Interesting. I thought only authoritarian regimes decide
| for citizens what they should or should not watch.
| Tainnor wrote:
| The Iraq war was wrong and stupid, it should never have
| happened. But that's just whataboutism. It doesn't make the
| Ukraine war or Russian disinformation any better to point out
| that the United States have messed up spectacularly more than
| just once.
|
| One difference, though, is that GWB never put anyone in
| prison for talking about the Iraq "war" or about how much the
| US government lied about WMD.
|
| > Is it because NATO is the "good" guy and Russia is the
| "bad" guy?
|
| I don't know that NATO is the "good" guy, but Ukraine is in
| this story (and they're not part of NATO). I'm saddened that
| it took about 2 days of everybody being in shock about the
| war until all the Russia apologists started re-emerging. One
| nation is brutally attacking another sovereign nation in
| complete violation of all international law and at the same
| time threatening the world with nuclear war. To me it's clear
| who the "bad" guy is.
| axiomsEnd wrote:
| If a war is just a TV news about no-one-really-cares part
| of Europe it's easy to treat it as another topic for debate
| and partisan discussion about USA. Because from my
| perspective this is main shift of the discussion - Russia,
| Ukraine, other bordering countries and their complicated
| history - they are being pushed away to discuss USA
| politics.
|
| I see refugees every day, on train station and in line near
| passport office, and I know how Russia influences politics
| of my country for years, and well, not for the better. I'm
| also not the biggest fan of USA, but it's really weird
| seeing how the whole story about Russia influence becomes
| basically "USA was worst".
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| The central point is that you need access to information to
| determine if a war is wrong and stupid. It is clear how
| censorship and propaganda can alter perception of who is
| the the good or bad guy.
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| But we are the goodies and already decided for you. Don't
| point out that we aren't the goodies or we'll accuse you
| of whataboutism or label you a conspiracy theorist and a
| Nazi for not trusting state-approved media.
| LexGray wrote:
| Given the information controls since Vietnam we have been
| lucky so far. This may well have been triggered by regulatory
| grumblings and could be a sign of greater US involvement.
|
| At least to me it feels similar to how big tech does weird
| things under gag orders.
|
| I can guess once this is in place we can expect government
| mandated rationing with chips diverted to weapons.
| archagon wrote:
| > _The question is, why is DDG okay with amplifying Ukranian
| /NATO propaganda and not Russian propaganda?_
|
| Because one side is busy shelling and starving civilians
| right now? Are you seriously suggesting that "NATO
| propaganda" (WTF?) and Russian propaganda are somehow
| equivalent?
|
| There is very, very obviously a "bad guy" here, and most of
| the world (even outside the US/NATO sphere of influence)
| seems to agree on this point.
| ensan wrote:
| "There is very, very obviously a "bad guy" here"
|
| No, there is absolutely not. If you consider the NATO
| expansion over the last few decades around Russia, it was
| completely sensible for Russia to preemptively take
| aggressive action. By the US standards, they have been very
| accommodating of civilian lives as well, even allowing
| protests in Ukrainian cities they're controlling.
|
| I personally find it very difficult to side with Ukraine
| given the rather significant prevalence of neo-Nazi groups
| in their ranks and the overall racism we have witnessed
| (see their treatment of foreign students).
|
| And if you want to see actual shelling and starvation of
| citizens, search for atrocities in Yemen, Gaza, Syria,
| Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq, etc., all directly committed or
| supported by the west. Ukrainians have evacuations
| corridors to Europe at least.
| archagon wrote:
| Regardless of the causes, you can see the atrocities with
| your own eyes. Thousands of civilians are dying, cease-
| fire agreements are ignored, evacuation corridors are
| being shelled.
|
| > And if you want to see actual shelling and starvation
| of citizens, search for atrocities in Yemen, Gaza, Syria,
| Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq, etc., all directly committed or
| supported by the west.
|
| Great, let's sanction the bastards responsible here, too.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > "Censoring" is a word very badly understood and prone to
| manipulation.
|
| Search results are also prone to manipulation. I suppose you
| could manipulate the search results for the word "censoring" to
| something that people who want to censor would prefer.
|
| > prevent haters from doing harm against others
| avgcorrection wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Have you been living under a rock? This narrow, don't-tread-on-
| me version of freedom-of-speech has been criticized in the
| Zeitgeist for a good while now; many people want the same
| principles to apply to private as well as state actors,
| equally.
|
| Most people talk about the concept of free speech. Not whatever
| federal law that deals with it in the US.
| diego_moita wrote:
| > Have you been living under a rock?
|
| > has been criticized in the Zeitgeist
|
| Zeitgeist? As in Twitter/FB/Whatsapp and other social
| networks' blabbering?
|
| Then yes, I've been living under a rock. I proudly refuse to
| be part of that cacophony.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| Well, you are on this site, no? I'm referring to the HN
| Zeitgeist (in part).
| snerbles wrote:
| This narrow "Free Speech == First Amendment and nothing else"
| interpretation is quite common with those that advocate
| controlling the speech of others.
| ohCh6zos wrote:
| The problem is that their product was advertised as not doing
| this. They are totally free to do this, but it makes their
| whole product unfit for purpose.
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| It also makes you question if they actually value privacy.
| goatcode wrote:
| > In case someone hasn't noticed, there is a war going on in
| Eurasia.
|
| I thought it was Eastasia.
| choward wrote:
| > In case someone hasn't noticed, there is a war going on in
| Europe. That is a circumstance where some of these cases apply.
|
| There's a saying: "Truth is the first casualty in war." The
| last thing I want during a war is censorship. Why should I
| magically start trusting the government and media now?
|
| > If this sounds just like "legalese" to you consider this: a
| newspaper has the right to select and editorialize the news it
| publishes, a bookseller has the right to choose what books to
| sell, a movie theatre or a movie producer also has rights to
| choose what to exhibit or produce. The same principle applies
| to what dang does here at HN. > > So why shouldn't DDG have the
| right to choose what search results to display?
|
| DuckDuckGo isn't a publisher. They are a search engine. And
| nobody is claiming that they don't have the right to do what
| they are doing. But by doing so they are just like the search
| engines everyone is trying to escape from. Sure, you might get
| privacy but who cares if the results are manipulated?
| colinmhayes wrote:
| > They are a search engine.
|
| Exactly. people go to search engines looking for information
| about things. If the search engine returns lies it's
| completely failed.
|
| > who cares if the results are manipulated?
|
| Not sure if you've noticed, but there's an entire industry
| built around manipulating search engine results. If the
| search engines don't fight back the only thing that will be
| left is corporate and government bullshit.
| kweingar wrote:
| > If the search engine returns lies it's completely failed
|
| If I search for Time Cube, should a search engine refuse to
| show me a link to its webpage?
| EastSmith wrote:
| Good default. Now give us a separate switch: "Russian Propaganda:
| on|off", similar to "Save Search".
| igravious wrote:
| Fantastic, you've written in AI that is able to distinguish
| information from disinformation. Turing Award incoming, I expect.
|
| Now, off to uninstall DDG.
| blain wrote:
| I personally don't like this move but seeing a lot other
| companies standing against Russia and applying similar
| "sanctions" makes me think they are doing this just for PR.
|
| I'm absolutely not saying they shouldn't do anything to show
| support for Ukraine but a simple short sentence or small banner
| somewhere would be much better instead.
| mrjangles wrote:
| Seriously what the f*ck makes Gabriel Weinberg think that myself,
| or anyone else, gives a damn about his personal opinion on what I
| should and should not be reading. The arrogance of these people
| is astounding.
|
| Also, absolutely zero of the standard base of Duck Duck Go users
| are the kind of people who don't understand what a Russian state
| controlled news site is, and why one would have to be careful
| reading it. Those people may well exist, but they would be using
| Google. This move makes their disdain for their users obvious.
|
| There is now no reason to be using Duck Duck Go over
| startpage.com, which also doesn't track you, but gives you the
| results straight from google, which are always much better than
| duck duck go.
| jayd16 wrote:
| What if I just want my tools to work and not come with land
| mines that at best are a distraction?
| wara23arish wrote:
| You echoed my thoughts and thanks for the alternative. Ive been
| a user of DDG for years and have recommended it to people
| constantly.
|
| Unfortunately since DDG caved today, they'll certainly cave in
| the future. Its just a matter of time.
| AmVess wrote:
| They just murdered any goodwill they had built up.
|
| I just switched to Yandex (Russian search). At least Yandex
| doesn't pretend to be something that it isn't.
| awb wrote:
| What? Do you do this in other elements of your life?
|
| "I'm not going to drink this veggie smoothie because they
| started adding honey and I don't think sugar is healthy. I'm
| going to drink soda where at least they don't try to hide
| that you're drinking sugar."
| thepasswordis wrote:
| Yes, I do this with other parts of my life. One of the most
| frustrating experiences I ever had grocery shopping was
| when I tried to buy "fancy" mayonnaise at whole foods. I
| was trying to cook something "nice" and wanted to get the
| good stuff, so that's where I went.
|
| The package said in bold letters, "Mayonnaise!" or some
| such, and what I didn't realize until I got home was that
| it wasn't actually mayonnaise, but some sort of
| vegan/literally not mayonnaise alternative.
|
| I wanted mayonnaise, I asked for mayonnaise, and I got
| something whole foods thought was healthier.
|
| Now when I'm shopping at WF (rarely), I am extra vigilant
| about making sure that what I am seeing on the label is
| actually what I am getting in the container. In fact, I try
| to avoid "fancy" alternatives to normal foods, because I
| find that they often replace normal ingredients with things
| they think are better for me.
|
| But I don't want that! I just want mayo, just give me mayo!
|
| I've also had this where I buy sour cream, or cottage
| cheese, and get home to find out that it has, in tiny
| letters, "reduced fat sour cream!" - NO! I want the fat in
| that sour cream or cottage cheese, that's literally why I'm
| buying it!
|
| edit: interestingly the mayo was _actually_ called "just
| mayo", but that's newspeak. It literally is _not_ mayo at
| all, it is a substitute for mayo that they think tastes
| similar. So "JUST MAYO" actually contains nothing that is
| mayo.
| awb wrote:
| OK, I could see using Yandex to search for Russian
| content.
| [deleted]
| coastflow wrote:
| This is interesting. From Wikipedia on "Just Mayo" [0]:
|
| "On October 31, 2014, Unilever (parent company of
| competing brand Hellmann's/Best Foods) filed a lawsuit
| against Hampton Creek for false advertising, arguing that
| Just Mayo cannot be marketed as mayonnaise because it
| does not meet the definition of the product specified by
| the Food and Drug Administration.[citation needed] The
| FDA requires that "mayonnaise" contain 65% vegetable oil
| and at least one egg yolk-containing ingredient; Just
| Mayo contains ingredients such as pea protein, beta-
| carotene, and modified food starch, none of which are
| used in mayonnaise according to FDA standards.[19]
| Unilever also noted the use of egg-oriented imagery in
| its promotional materials, and stated that its false
| claims were "part of a larger campaign and pattern of
| unfair competition by Hampton Creek to falsely promote
| Just Mayo spread as tasting better than, and being
| superior to, Best Foods and Hellmann's mayonnaise."
| Hampton Creek CEO Josh Tetrick denied any wrongdoing,
| believing that Unilever's lawsuit was meant to solely
| hinder competition.[13][20]
|
| "On December 18, 2014, Unilever dropped the lawsuit so
| Hampton Creek could work with "industry groups and
| appropriate regulatory authorities" on resolving its
| labelling, while also complimenting the company for its
| "commitment to innovation and its inspired corporate
| purpose."[21] In August 2015, the FDA sent Hampton Creek
| a formal warning that Just Mayo's labeling was misleading
| due to the product not meeting the standards for
| "mayonnaise", and because of wording on the packaging and
| promotional materials that contained an "implied health
| claim that these products can reduce the risk of heart
| disease due to the absence of cholesterol," which cannot
| be included as it contains too much fat to be promoted
| with such statements.[19]
|
| "In December 2015, Hampton Creek announced that it had
| agreed to revise its packaging for Just Mayo in order to
| comply with the FDA's recommendations. The new label
| contains more prominent statements surrounding the nature
| of the product, and contains an explanation that the word
| "Just" in the product's name is defined as being "guided
| by reason, justice, and fairness."[22][23]"
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_Mayo
| endymi0n wrote:
| So you think it's better to use a search engine openly
| spewing propaganda than one that tries to curb it?
|
| It sounds like the Putin fans who seem to like him ,,because
| he's a strong willed man who does not change his mind" as if
| that was some kind of qualification.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Different filters for different purposes.
|
| Results are often banned by topic or keyword, not publisher
| or context.
|
| At this point I don't trust US search engines not to censor
| official public statements and announcements from the US
| government.
| skinnymuch wrote:
| Your second paragraph is unnecessary.
| wrycoder wrote:
| Why use startpage? Google's results are biased in both
| political and non-political ways.
| colordrops wrote:
| All else being equal (and now they are with DDG admitting
| bias), google is better
| kdazzle wrote:
| > Also, absolutely zero of the standard base of Duck Duck Go
| users are the kind of people who don't understand what a
| Russian state controlled news site is, and why one would have
| to be careful reading it.
|
| You sure about that? I keep hearing about the Jan 6ers being
| big DDG users. They seem like the types that aren't too savvy
| when it comes to misinformation.
| MildlySerious wrote:
| Exactly. The qanon conspiracy nuts have been pushing DDG as
| an alternative to Google for a while now, and they most
| definitely don't have that awareness. In fact, they tend to
| get ridiculously defensive when offering the thought that RT
| is no less "big bad MSM" than their usual targets.
| enragedcacti wrote:
| > Also, absolutely zero of the standard base of Duck Duck Go
| users are the kind of people who don't understand what a
| Russian state controlled news site is
|
| DDG advertises on billboards, on the radio, on TV, etc. They
| are absolutely trying to attract an audience who doesn't all
| know what RT or Sputnik are.
| [deleted]
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| > The arrogance of these people is astounding.
|
| The arrogance to think that DDG should change their business to
| revolve around you personally is astounding.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| I'm curious what you think the value of this comment is.
|
| You aren't trying to convince the person you responded to.
|
| The rest of us in the "I really liked DDG but am upset by
| this decision" bucket aren't the targets of this either.
|
| Even other users who are less opinionated on this move
| inherently want DDG to care about them as users!
|
| Do you think there is some squad of super pro-corporation
| folks your point is selling to? "Ah yes, well, if it helps
| DDG make a buck, it doesn't matter how I the user feel..."
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| The poster threw a temper tantrum so I wanted to point out
| their ironic arrogance.
|
| It's also a bit tone deaf considering current events in
| Europe right now. This goes a little further than merely
| down ranking different opinions- these are weapons in a war
| that's currently being waged.
| Minor49er wrote:
| Edit: Retracting my advocating for using Bing directly. As
| ColinHayhurst pointed out elsewhere in the comments, Bing is
| also excluding results, specifically RT and Sputnik (see the
| "Protection from state-sponsored disinformation" section):
|
| https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2022/02/28/ukraine...
| Spivak wrote:
| This is a weird stance to take about a search engine which is
| "tell me what to read as a service." Like you're literally
| using them to surface the wheat from the chaff. The algorithm
| that ranks results is already biased as hell and sometimes it's
| going to get it wrong. Google surfacing lots of stackoverflow
| spam sites isn't "unbiased" it's junk and manual correction is
| totally fine.
| bmarquez wrote:
| > This is a weird stance to take about a search engine which
| is "tell me what to read as a service."
|
| If users don't like the change in the search engine algorithm
| (for whatever reason), they'll stop using the search engine.
| It's not a weird stance to take.
|
| At the very least this HN submission is surfacing search
| engine competitors like Startpage, Brave, and Kagi.
| mountainb wrote:
| People can want a search engine that does stuff without
| running it through a Politburo filter. For a very long time
| that was the social norm in search engines. DDG marketed
| itself as "we follow the old norm, pick us and not the
| other bad guys." Now they are adopting the political
| censorship norm, contrary to their earlier marketing.
| colordrops wrote:
| There's a difference between a low level filtering algorithm
| and manually curated results based on politics.
| Spivak wrote:
| Of course, the right way to do it is to survey the common
| elements of sites whose politics you don't like and then
| add an "unbiased" content-agnostic rule punishing those
| elements.
| mattwilsonn888 wrote:
| This word keeps coming in this comments section: "spam." Spam
| was never mentioned in the Tweet, the source of this
| discussion. In fact no one in the comments section is talking
| about spam either, unless its a pathetic debunking attempt.
| They are talking about genuine results being down-ranked
| based on their ideological, even morally unscrupulous
| content, and why that is harmful to intelligent people who
| don't need their information retrieval service helping them
| form thoughts.
| Spivak wrote:
| I just used spam sites as an example of "site that's highly
| ranked by the algorithm but are uncontroversially
| recognized as an error."
|
| Define a "genuine result" for a search engine that isn't
| the result of a process that arbitrarily ranks sites by
| certain metrics? Like it's humans all the way down, you
| can't escape that search engines are a large scale system
| representing "what a group of humans thinks the best
| results are." There's no unbiased algorithms in search,
| it's all curation.
| mattwilsonn888 wrote:
| As I said - nobody here is confused what spam entails.
| I'll remind you again the Tweet did not say it it
| targeting spam - and your conflation of spam with
| misinformation is a useful bit of ignorance for those who
| want control narratives. Slippery slope, friend.
| diputsmonro wrote:
| Is propaganda a "genuine result"? Yeah yeah, one person's
| truth is another person's propaganda and sometimes the
| lines are blurry. But cases like RT are pretty clear cut.
| Sometimes people _actually do_ lie, and those lies are
| verifiable. Verifiable lies, and the sources who create
| them predictably and consistently, should not be considered
| a "genuine result" for a query regarding things that are
| happening right now.
|
| Pretending that both sides are equal is not always helpful.
| Bad actors _do_ exist, and pretending that everything is
| equally indeterminate is a fatally nihilistic and dangerous
| view. Sometimes we actually _can_ tell when something is a
| lie, and we should treat it appropriately. For a tool that
| retrieves genuine results matching a query, that means
| down-ranking them.
|
| For the purposes of current event queries, disinformation
| is certainly spam. The purpose of spam is to fool you into
| doing something you probably wouldn't otherwise do, usually
| based on false pretenses. Disinformation is the same. The
| action it promotes is more indirect - it seeks to influence
| beliefs, and therefore voting patterns and soft power - but
| it is still spread with a purpose that is disingenuous. It
| disguises it's true intent and is dangerous to the user. It
| is effectively spam applied to the domain of politics and
| current events, and should be treated as spam is. It should
| not be a valid result in an information retrieval service.
|
| I agree that this ranking could be the start of a slippery
| slope. But DDG is being transparent, and you can still get
| to RT if you disagree. This is a good measure for people
| unfamiliar with Russia news sources and propaganda
| networks, who are the people most likely to be susceptible
| to Russian propaganda.
| kweingar wrote:
| I think there is a conflation of literal fake news and
| propaganda. Propaganda can be subtle and not involve
| outright lies. A lot of propaganda consists of
| unsubstantiated rumors or speculation.
|
| Sometimes it is helpful to read unsubstantiated rumors or
| speculation because it is notable. For example, the
| United States recently claimed that a foreign power was
| targeting its diplomats with a high powered microwave
| weapon. Substantial evidence was never produced, but
| American news media reported the story uncritically. I
| think that much of the reporting on this topic was
| disinformation or propaganda. At the same time, if I
| wanted to read about it, I would expect search engines
| not to make the editorial decision to censor this
| reporting. Even if it is disinformation, informed people
| should be aware of these accusations. In this case, I
| don't expect the search engine to return the "truth" but
| rather "what is being said on this topic."
| GauntletWizard wrote:
| Cases like RT are clear cut to you. Others have other
| opinions. I think that the Russian claims that Ukraine is
| harboring neo-nazis are significantly bunk and are poor
| excuse for the invasion, but I also think you can't deny
| that the Azov Brigade exists, and I want to hear the
| Russian take on that even if I think it's half lies.
| diputsmonro wrote:
| Then you can still go over to rt.com and check that out
| for yourself. With your knowledge that it is half lies,
| you can be actively engaged and discerning. But those
| lies should not be easily accessible for the uninitiated
| who are just casually curious about current events.
| mattwilsonn888 wrote:
| Intelligent people are better off not patronized - and
| fighting disinformation through censorship rather than
| rebuttal is a pathetic reflection on the state of
| society. This type of censorship makes it harder for
| intelligent people to make clear rebuttals and reinforces
| a culture of tarring people taking the first step of
| looking into the other side for this purpose.
| Spivak wrote:
| This is always the line but it ignores that it's more
| vastly more effort to correct disinformation and
| propaganda than it is to spew it. Don't patronize
| intelligent people by making them have to spend literally
| their entire day having to fight this garbage rather than
| doing useful work.
| mattwilsonn888 wrote:
| Or you could do the obvious: give people capable of
| contextualizing search results unnerfed tools.
| therein wrote:
| You are absolutely right. Such hubris on Gabriel Weinberg's
| end. Today marks the last day I will ever be using DDG.
|
| We knew they weren't really actually in it for privacy anyway.
| This just settles it.
| fossislife wrote:
| I used DDG in the past, because they did not tamper with the
| search results. Privacy is secondary to me. Now I switch to
| another search engine.
| sp332 wrote:
| "they did not tamper with the search results"
|
| DDG has always been bold about downranking and deleting spam.
| trhway wrote:
| Right now Russia is an enemy to any normal person/company who
| opposes the genocidal war Russia is waging in Ukraine. It is
| perfectly fine to strike at your enemy's propaganda.
| freediver wrote:
| 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.
| HeckFeck wrote:
| For me, this move by DDG will have the opposite effect of what
| is intended.
|
| I will now trust my own media and sources even less, if they
| rely on silencing the competition and insist on controlling
| what I access "for _my_ own good ". Such dirty tactics are
| insulting, even more so when delivered under a sneering
| benevolent guise.
|
| As if they have perfect knowledge of my motives and wishes.
| What if I'm genuinely curious as to how the Russian media is
| presenting this war? They must have access to this perfect
| knowledge if they are fit to decide which news sources are
| "correct"!
| ScarletEmerald wrote:
| Would you trust a source of medical information less if it
| declined to present or link to information that breathing CO
| is healthy, drinking mineral spirits is fine, and handling
| mercury with bare skin is safe and fun?
| LudwigNagasena wrote:
| Well, I started trusting the sources of medical information
| less since they quickly moved from "masks don't help common
| people" to "everyone should wear a mask" in a heartbeat
| even though we had a dozen of epidemics and a couple
| pandemics before so surely that sounds like something that
| should a settled issue (saying we don't know and it heavily
| depends on the infection would also count as a good
| answer).
| tengbretson wrote:
| Well let's flip this around. How many articles of
| misinformation advocating breathing CO would you have to
| read before you personally tried it?
|
| If the answer is that you never would, then you are not
| advocating for something that protects you, just those that
| you see as inferior to you
| skinnymuch wrote:
| 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.
| hobs wrote:
| 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.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Yeah, actually. Let me tell you about something that will
| illustrate. Once upon a time, Amazon had a flood of fake
| reviews. They would rate to 5 and be in terrible Engrish
| and the different styles were pretty easy to detect. I
| could use that as a signal that the product was bad and
| that the field of these products is likely risky.
|
| Eventually, Amazon started getting rid of all these
| reviews. There are still fake reviews but they're more
| subtle than that. So now I have lost my signal that said
| "tread carefully for products in this class" and I have
| lost some signal that said "this product has fakers
| involved or in its competitors".
|
| So now, yes, I trust Amazon less.
|
| I am not making up a hypothetical universe. I am sure
| others have shared this experience.
| gruez wrote:
| >Would you trust a source of medical information less if it
| declined to present or link to information
|
| Unfortunately, there's a wide ecosystem of conspiracy
| minded sites that link to each other. They even have papers
| supporting them, eg. studies in favor of homeopathy
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9310601/
| belter wrote:
| My favorite Randi joke about homeopathy...
|
| "An homeopath died from overdose. He forgot to take his
| medicaments..."
| bastardoperator wrote:
| Sounds like you could just navigate to those sites and skip
| the search all together?
| 8note wrote:
| What I really want is to have a setting where I can turn
| these kinds of filters on and off, or to different/customized
| priorities.
|
| Search is a tool for me to use: give me better control of the
| results that I can get. Choosing between different ranking
| algorithms would be wonderful too, to skip around different
| SEO strategies
| TechBro8615 wrote:
| 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 the information _they_ consume -- they're
| pro-censorship of the information _other_ people consume.
|
| Even if you _could_ find a user who wants their client to
| hide information from them, that user probably doesn't want
| to filter their own spam, too. By default, the client
| already expects the server to fulfill a gatekeeping role in
| filtering (censoring!) spam. In fact, this is how we got
| here in the first place - we delegated filtering mechanisms
| to service providers, and now they're simply expanding the
| filter.
|
| Personally, I'm in favor of a simple but likely effective
| regulation: Any service that renders a feed of third-party
| content to the user must default to sorting the feed in
| reverse chronological order, and must reset all current
| users to this default on the day the legislation goes into
| effect. Of course, this only mitigates the feed-based,
| mostly social-media problem -- it doesn't solve the issues
| with search results (or auto-complete suggestions, for that
| matter). For search results, a client-based model wouldn't
| scale, as client preferences need to be evaluated at time
| of indexing, not when returning results.
| tomc1985 wrote:
| > It sounds like you're advocating for pushing censorship
| responsibility to the user.
|
| It is really irresponsible to be phrasing censorship as a
| "responsibility". Censorship is a tool of the weak and
| simple-minded so that they can maintain the illusions of
| a shared reality promulgated by whoever is in charge. The
| only responsibility should be towards the free and
| unadulterated flow of information, and yes, it is the
| individual's responsibility to make sense of that in a
| civilized fashion.
|
| My only exception to this rule is for things that are
| irrelevant to seeker's intent to acquire more
| information, advertising falls into this bucket.
| kikokikokiko wrote:
| 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, russians), commented on the geopolitical causes
| for the war a month before it started for real etc.
|
| Through his channel I found the lectures by John J
| Mearsheimer, and that's the only reason I can say that I
| "understand" what the hell is happening over there.
|
| It's a real shame that a financial advice channel, from a 3rd
| world country, is the last bastion of thrust I can find in
| order to get informed about the most important geopolitical
| event of the last decade. The mainstream media/tech oligopoly
| are a disgrace to mankind.
| atlantas wrote:
| I replaced mainstream media with Breaking Points
| (https://www.youtube.com/c/breakingpoints). I've found them
| to be far more reliable.
| ameetgaitonde wrote:
| Can you please explain it, because I'm very curious what
| you believe is the truth.
| typon wrote:
| Liberals are trying to cancel Mearsheimer for his views on
| the causes of this war and his geopolitics in general. So
| fret not, soon you won't have ANY voice opposing American
| mainstream opinion.
| verisimi wrote:
| > I simply can't trust ANY media, search engine, or social
| network anymore.
|
| No, you can't. It really comes down to a choice of which
| unhinged violent group of psychopaths do you want to
| believe.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqKfSbhm6yo This is a great
| explanation of the anarchist perspective.
|
| Great quote:
|
| "Ukraine has been this mess for many many many years of
| people arguing about which of authoritarian control freaks
| should get violently dominate everybody. That is a question
| that doesn't have a right answer."
| orestarod wrote:
| Choosing who sociopath to believe is way down the road
| (and in my opinion not necessary in the end to "believe"
| anyone, you ideally have your judgement to filter out the
| noise and get the however little information). The step
| we still have not gotten past is to be able to listen to
| all the psychopaths in the first place. At this moment,
| the psychopath with the most strength near you prohibits
| other psychopaths from being heard at all.
| atlantas wrote:
| > I will now trust my own media and sources even less, if
| they rely on silencing the competition and insist on
| controlling
|
| As you should! It's actually exactly what authoritarian
| governments like Russia do. They silence and control
| information, blocking out other sources aside from their own
| propaganda. Everything else is said to be dangerous
| disinformation.
| colpabar wrote:
| 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!
| einarfd wrote:
| 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 informed, and if you are fortunate
| enough to speak English, there is so many serious news
| sources out there with different viewpoints it's crazy.
| So there is not much of an excuse.
| pydry wrote:
| Meanwhile Russia concocts evidence of chemical weapons
| labs and those same people who believed in WMDs cant
| fathom how Russians could fall for this shit....
| shapefrog wrote:
| While simultaneously people who rant constantly about
| "mainstream meadia" claim that because RT broadcast it,
| that it must be true and can in no way be propaganda.
| enragedcacti wrote:
| 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 helpful
| to a reasonable person.
|
| At least in their case they truly believe it, with
| disinformation the entire goal is to exploit DDGs users to
| pretty much everyone's detriment. Of course if I search for "RT
| ukrainian conflict" RT should show up, 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?
|
| Of course its possible that the net is too wide, but I find it
| weird that there is a slippery slope censorship argument going
| on when search engines have been trying to serve authentic
| results and beat out inauthentic ones for 20+ years.
| freediver wrote:
| There are many problematic aspects of DDG's decision, but
| here are just a couple of angles.
|
| Both sides in the conflict spread disinformation. DDG desides
| to downrank only results related to disinformation from one
| side. This makes it a decision based on a political bias and
| not search quality bias (which would cause all disinformation
| to be downranked - which is OK and actually a desireable
| thing in a search engine). By not downranking disinformation
| from the other side, which is equally bad content, this steps
| out of the scope of what a search engine should be interested
| in doing.
|
| Secondly, how in the world would DDG have the resources or
| capabilities to determine what is disinformation in the first
| place? Much larger companies like Facebook failed at this. It
| is generally considered that the 'fog of war' is a real thing
| and there is no single source of news on this planet that did
| not spread some disinformation at some point. DDG would
| probably have to downrank half of the sites in its results,
| and probably every site that ever published any information
| about this conflict, if they were to be consistent. Something
| like this is basically unenforcable from an
| engineering/algorithmic standpoint.
|
| So basically from a business perspective, this has to be a
| bet that the publicity from this act would net them more
| users than they started with in the markets they care about.
| pvaldes wrote:
| > Both sides in the conflict spread disinformation.
|
| One of them does not have free press and kill journalists.
| Both cases are not even remotely comparable.
| freediver wrote:
| But a general purpose web search engine should not be in
| a business of determining which side has a higher moral
| ground in a human conflict?
| spoils19 wrote:
| 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.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| Is people choosing which search engine they use based off
| the results it returns not the free market in action?
| spoils19 wrote:
| It is not transparent what kind of curations take place
| to return the results. You cannot have a free market
| without transparency, and while DDG are announcing this
| now, they have no obligation to in the future. Previously
| the status quo was "we don't curate", now it's "we curate
| but announce it". What's the chance that they will no
| longer announce it in the future?
| colinmhayes wrote:
| > It is not transparent what kind of curations take place
| to return the results.
|
| This is true for all search engines because it's
| literally impossible to return even half decent results
| if everyone knows your algorithm. It'll just be pages and
| pages of SEO nonsense. If you believed for even a second
| that search engines can exist without curating you
| haven't been thinking very hard. Not curating would only
| ensure that you see nothing but propaganda.
| spoils19 wrote:
| > you haven't been thinking very hard
|
| Please ensure you're following the HN Guidelines[1] when
| leaving replies :^)
|
| [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| ipaddr wrote:
| Could it work?
|
| A search engine based on popularity is the basis of
| google 2004.
|
| What no one has done is a search engine where you can
| select who's version of what's popular to use. What do
| people in my area.. My age group.. My shared interest
| visit when they search 'eye blush'
| orthecreedence wrote:
| > 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" such that it would encompass
| the exact algorithms used in a privately-owned search
| engine.
| ipaddr wrote:
| 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.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| Free markets require competition. Are there other search
| engines of similar quality that don't do this?
| throwaway_23452 wrote:
| avgcorrection wrote:
| If I am interested in Flat Earth Theory and search for that
| then I expect to get results that Flat Earth believers are
| interested in. It's that simple.
| astine wrote:
| If you're actually interested in flat earth theory you'll
| search for "Flat Earth." If you search for "Charting a
| Flight", You're probably not looking for flat earth
| content.
| julesnp wrote:
| To me that has to do with search results being tuned for
| relevancy, not due the the perceived quality of the
| information.
| astine wrote:
| Maybe, but you could also argue that bad information is
| irrelevant. If I search for "cancer treatment", it's not
| necessarily helpful for "black salve" to pop-up on my
| search results.
| brimble wrote:
| And a Flat Earth take on how to chart a flight path isn't
| relevant because...?
| CWuestefeld wrote:
| The announcement makes me suspect that it's down-ranking
| results not for _what_ they are, but _who_ it 's from. That
| is, penalizing results based on their being from a disfavored
| source.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| That's been a valid approach ever since expertsexchange.com
| dropped off the radar. It's one of the many tools in the
| toolbox for dealing with SEO games.
| azangru wrote:
| > 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?
|
| This is a very strange strawman. The implicit assumptions in
| this question are:
|
| - That DuckDuckGo 'defaulted' to RT or to some other Russian
| media, which is hardly the case. It is the task of a search
| engine to infer, from its users' behaviour, which resources
| they find the most useful in providing answers to given
| queries.
|
| - That other sources do not have a clear agenda :-)
| deltarholamda wrote:
| >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.
| burnished wrote:
| So like, what, everyones keeping this big secret and its
| just schlubs like you and me kept in the dark?
| vkou wrote:
| I don't think it's some kind of backroom secret that most
| media, US, Russian, or otherwise, is utter shit. It
| should be pretty evident from looking at its coverage of
| any subject of which you have a better-than-average
| understanding of, or from contrasting how media produced
| in different parts of the world looks at the same exact
| events. Or even from applying a little bit of critical
| thinking. From looking at what it gets right, what it
| gets wrong, and to what degree it is wrong.
|
| Unfortunately, the alternatives to mainstream media
| (Q-idiots, Zero Hedge, Info Wars, random dude with an
| opinionated blog, some pot comedian's podcast, viral
| memes on facebook, etc), tend to be even worse. And for
| every time they may occasionally be right about
| something, there's another dozen times when they are
| laughably, pants-on-head wrong.
|
| There's no easy solution to being informed... That you
| can just passively consume on your smartphone.
| deltarholamda wrote:
| >Unfortunately, the alternatives to mainstream media
| (Q-idiots, Zero Hedge, Info Wars, random dude with an
| opinionated blog, some pot comedian's podcast, viral
| memes on facebook, etc)
|
| The alternative to one source of dubious information is
| not another source of dubious information. The
| alternative is to have access to all sorts of
| information, and piece together what you think is true,
| using your own critical thinking skills and ability to
| sniff out BS.
|
| That used to be the Internet. It is not the Internet
| anymore, since the Internet has, for the first time I can
| think of, decided that This One Particular Country is
| uniquely bad, for Reasons, and should therefore be
| unpersoned; and also has the ability to squelch any
| dissent because so much of the Internet has become siloed
| in big corporations. It's really weird, and I find it
| suspicious.
| ilikehurdles wrote:
| I would be interested in seeing perspectives of North
| Korean leadership and current events shared by their
| state media apparatuses purely for
| educational/entertainment value.
|
| In general, however, truthful and accurate information is
| more valuable for learning about a topic. I'm not going
| to rely on getting that from a regime that imprisons
| people for sharing data and analyses that challenge the
| regime's narrative. It's inherently more untrustworthy
| than a society that protects free press.
|
| When these regimes target their media for foreign
| audiences like you and me, it's in their best interest to
| mask the origin of that content. Becoming more informed
| becomes harder when this context is unavailable to us.
|
| Ranking those sources lower specifically improves the end
| product and results in a better informed user.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| I think you're conflating "large coordinated action" with
| "the Internet." They look similar, but it's more that a
| critical mass of not-Russia is deciding to stand up to
| Russia because Russia's political action in this
| situation is some seriously beyond-the-pale early-20th-
| century war of conquest stuff.
|
| There _is_ some consolidation happening (mostly around
| the fact that a lot of the companies we regularly use are
| "Western" and most of the governments of the West have
| imposed sanctions on Russia that those companies have to
| comply with), but it's also a that the meme has taken
| hold that (a) Russia deserves to be opposed and (b)
| sanctions and cutting-off are an effective way to oppose
| them.
| empthought wrote:
| > The alternative is to have access to all sorts of
| information, and piece together what you think is true,
| using your own critical thinking skills and ability to
| sniff out BS.
|
| This strategy is vulnerable to supply-chain attacks on
| your information sources... which is exactly what Russian
| information warfare carries out.
|
| The credibility of American and European "mainstream
| media" is oft-maligned but rarely actually demonstrated
| to be suspect at a large scale in the news departments.
| Editorial choices of what to cover and when are the most
| common complaint, which is a far cry from astroturfing
| and falsehoods made out of whole cloth that Russian
| sources typically engage in.
| deltarholamda wrote:
| >This strategy is vulnerable to supply-chain attacks on
| your information sources
|
| There is no single strategy, there is no silver bullet. I
| certainly didn't intend to imply that there was. One can
| only make their best effort. Any strategy is going to
| have flaws.
|
| >which is a far cry from astroturfing and falsehoods made
| out of whole cloth that Russian sources typically engage
| in
|
| American mass media has historically done exactly those
| things. There never was a time where The News was
| trustworthy, unbiased, and disinterested in politics.
| This continues today. You can look around the Internet--
| at least for now--and find where people have compiled
| examples of mainstream American news flat-out staging a
| scene for the TV to give an impression that is not true,
| such as a long-distance zoomed in shot of a crowd that
| makes the few dozen protesters seem like they fill a
| large area.
|
| I wouldn't downplay the editorial decisions that you
| mention either. That is a hugely powerful lever of
| control. Yanking RT or whoever from search results is
| _exactly_ that, only this time it is exercised by
| corporate tech companies.
|
| Finally, one can _always_ find a reason why this thing is
| worse than this other thing, and one is therefore
| justified in doing whatever it is one wanted to do
| anyway. This line of argumentation rarely impresses me.
| empthought wrote:
| > I wouldn't downplay the editorial decisions that you
| mention either. That is a hugely powerful lever of
| control. Yanking RT or whoever from search results is
| exactly that, only this time it is exercised by corporate
| tech companies.
|
| The costs of letting disinformation flow freely are far
| greater than the costs of downranking sources known for
| disinformation. One only need look at the antivax
| movement to confirm this.
|
| > Finally, one can always find a reason why this thing is
| worse than this other thing, and one is therefore
| justified in doing whatever it is one wanted to do
| anyway. This line of argumentation rarely impresses me.
|
| Good thing the responsible parties have no interest in or
| duty regarding impressing you, then. Whatabouters don't
| impress me, personally.
| deltarholamda wrote:
| >The costs of letting disinformation flow freely
|
| As I said, "one can always find a reason why this thing
| is worse than this other thing, and one is therefore
| justified in doing whatever it is one wanted to do
| anyway." Simply slap a "disinformation" label on it.
|
| I hope you are similarly motivated by these airy
| principles when the next government employs these same
| tactics to do things you do not agree with, but I rather
| suspect you will not be.
| archagon wrote:
| If you compare mainstream Russian media to mainstream US
| media and come to the conclusion that they're equally
| "utter shit", then you have no idea what you're talking
| about.
| vkou wrote:
| I didn't say they are _equally_ bad, but they are both,
| objectively, quite bad. They can also both be worth
| reading, but you need to both know the history, and
| _think_ about what you are reading, why it was written,
| and who it was written for.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| The advantage of getting information from a diverse set
| of random sources is that they're often pretty good at
| exposing the misinformation of other sources.
|
| Mainstream sources keep talking about a particular bill
| and then you read, "hey, that's a misrepresentation,
| here's the text of the bill and it doesn't say that."
| They link to the text on the government website and it
| turns out, they're right. The bill doesn't say that.
|
| Then the same guy starts talking about vaccines and you
| have to go somewhere else to see the debunk of that.
| Minor49er wrote:
| 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
| HideousKojima wrote:
| It's not a conspiracy (few things are because they just
| don't scale well). It's more what I call "assholes with
| similar motives/incentives." It has a lot of the
| appearance of coordination without needing secret
| meetings in smoke-filled rooms.
|
| That said, sometimes it actually is coordination. Just
| look at the JournoList scandal.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Isn't the "JournoList scandal" just "There was a Google
| Group that lots of journalists on the left subscribed
| to?"
|
| Journalists have always talked to each other. The fact
| that we have an auditable mailing list of one instance of
| it just tells us something we already know.
| deltarholamda wrote:
| >Isn't the "JournoList scandal" just "There was a Google
| Group that lots of journalists on the left subscribed
| to?"
|
| No, they were coordinating messaging to get the results
| they wanted. That's the scandal, because they were
| simultaneously presenting themselves as Objective
| Journalists.
| HideousKojima wrote:
| "If the right forces us all to either defend Wright or
| tear him down, no matter what we choose, we lose the game
| they've put upon us. Instead, take one of them - Fred
| Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares - and call them racists"
|
| Yes, that sounds like journalists just "talking to each
| other."
| archagon wrote:
| 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?)
| eli wrote:
| What does down-ranking disinformation sites globally have to do
| with complaining about Google customizing results based on its
| profile of you?
|
| EDIT: The rest of the quote is "On Google, you get results
| tailored to what they think you're likely to click on, based on
| the data profile they've built on you over time."
| coffeefirst wrote:
| And in this specific case, it feels more like quality control
| of state-sponsored spam.
|
| You can still find these sites--they come up first if you
| look for them directly, they're just treated as the low
| quality information than they are.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| Cool, you can have a checkbox for 'Protect me from being
| stupid' and click it on each of your searches. This allows
| you to be protected from "state-sponsored spam" without
| imposing your intellectual shortcomings on everyone else.
| mattwilsonn888 wrote:
| And why should anyone believe that State sponsored spam
| doesn't come from all angles? If I'm going to receive
| propaganda, I at least would like consistent sampling of
| it. And who cares about any of that - you have admonished
| an information search provider to determine what
| information it serves you based on subjective, undisclosed
| criteria of which there is good reason to believe is
| ideologically motivated.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| Some people consume information from outlets like Al
| Jazeera because they would like something which might be a
| little more distanced from the West than things like Anglo
| outlets.
| coffeefirst wrote:
| Right, but Al Jazeera is more like the BBC than it is
| like RT. I don't see anyone making a quality-based
| argument to downrank it, and I would disagree with them
| if they did.
| mardifoufs wrote:
| Aljazeera is literally the Qatari state media. That means
| they are the media outlet of a slave state controlled by
| an absolute monarchy . Tell anyone in the Arabic world
| that aljazeera is neutral or BBC like and you will get
| laughed at. Even RT is probably not on as short of an
| editorial leash than al jazeera.
|
| Your comment is actually an amazing example of why we
| should absolutely avoid media censorship (like the EU is
| doing right now); it seems like the people who are
| usually the most vocally pushing for it are also, not
| coincidentally, those who are also the most likely to be
| completely oblivious to propaganda even when it's right
| in front of them. Yet also think that they are impervious
| to it.
| empthought wrote:
| The BBC is literally the UK state media.
| mardifoufs wrote:
| 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.
| ashwagary wrote:
| You stated that you aren't British. You should probably
| ask some Brits what they think about the BBC and
| understand their criticisms. You may be surprised by the
| response.
|
| They generally do not consider it unbiased at all and
| many would call it false propaganda, especially if they
| are Irish or Scottish.
| hereforphone wrote:
| Have you remembered to renew your BBC license this year?
| mardifoufs wrote:
| I'm not British but I still think a license based
| financing is still probably better than financing from
| the ruling family of a slave petrostate.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| Downranking "disinformation" could be seen as creating the
| sort of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_bubble that
| Weinberg often denigrates.
|
| > As a result, users become separated from information that
| disagrees with their viewpoints, effectively isolating them
| in their own cultural or ideological bubbles. The choices
| made by these algorithms are not transparent.
|
| I don't think it's unfounded criticism.
|
| One problem is how arbitrary the categorization of
| "disinformation" can be. Once you go down the path, it can
| also create a scenario where you tacitly approve the things
| you don't decide to censor/downrank. While I can argue both
| sides, it simply doesn't come without trade-offs.
| kube-system wrote:
| Filter bubbles are personalized. This is not personalized.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| No it doesn't. What creates filter bubbles is ranking sites
| differently for each person, what has no relation at all
| with the criteria you use on your rank.
|
| Personally, I use DDG because it's useful. As long as the
| new ranking makes them more useful, more power to them. If
| they do it wrong, I'll start looking for some replacement.
|
| If Google did that (as they do) it would require some
| discussion about censorship and monopolies, but yeah,
| there's nothing wrong with DDG doing it.
| twofornone wrote:
| >No it doesn't. What creates filter bubbles is ranking
| sites differently for each person, what has no relation
| at all with the criteria you use on your rank
|
| That's assuming there's only one platform. When users can
| choose other search engines (or social media sites, video
| platforms, etc) then it absolutely creates a filter
| bubble when each platform injects its own bias into its
| content. No algorithm is perfect but I'd generally prefer
| my search results without deliberate bias.
|
| Plus you'd have to be knee deep in the koolaid to think
| that only russian sources are propaganda. It just ao
| happens they are obviously on the "other side" today but
| let's not pretend that US and Ukranian sources aren't
| coming with their own healthy dose of spin.
|
| For example, all the recent reports of civilian
| infrastructure being bombed are most certainly leaving
| out that these buildings were being used by Ukranian
| forces, much like reports of Israel targeting civilian
| buildings. That doesn't justify the russian actions since
| putin is fighting an unjust war of aggression, but that
| important context is an example of spin that is all over
| the "approved" sources of information.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| The case of different platforms is not a filter bubble.
| It's just a social bubble like it always existed.
|
| The fundamental feature of a filter bubble is that you
| can not escape it. If all it takes is looking at another
| site, it's not it.
|
| Anyway, I prefer my search results devoid of known
| falsehoods. I don't believe it at all that DDG can
| achieve this, but if there's a loud known source of that
| can be cut without false positives, I do prefer that it's
| cut. Unfortunately, verifying the mainstream news isn't
| such an easy task, so that DDG will become both more
| reliable and more biased at the same time. Personally, I
| don't care much for the bias. I care about the
| reliability.
|
| (And yes, all of your conclusions are probably true.)
| eli wrote:
| No, it can't. A filter bubble is specifically defined as
| users getting personalized results for the same query based
| on what an algorithm knows about them. It's right there in
| the first paragraph on wikipedia.
|
| A hyper-partisan search engine that only showed results
| that favor one viewpoint would be bad, but it wouldn't be a
| filter bubble.
| carry_bit wrote:
| With search taken as a whole, the search results a person
| gets varies depending on a personal factor (namely, their
| go-to search engine) and not just the query. That's
| similar to a filter bubble, even if it isn't precisely
| one.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| When I read the wiki page, I don't personally think much
| swivels on whether a human or algorithm creates the
| filter since the reason it's an issue is the end result.
|
| Or rather, "it's okay since it's not an algorithm doing
| it" doesn't wave away the concerns very effectively.
| chaosite wrote:
| The argument you're responding to wasn't "it's okay since
| it's not an algorithm doing it". It was "it's not a
| filter bubble since it's not personalized".
| pvaldes wrote:
| This is not an us or them case, is a true or false case.
| And false and true don't share a value of 50/50%. Unless
| we want to use a browser as moron-classifier, false
| results had a value of 0 in a search.
|
| False facts are valuable in a search only as if tagged as
| debunked as false in the same page.
| squiggy22 wrote:
| If people started using the word 'false' instead of
| disinformation I think the distinction would be clearer.
|
| We aren't talking about good results versus bad results here
| surely? When did bias come into it? Merely falsehoods versus
| truths? Or have we got to the point where no one actually
| believes in such anymore and it depends on your political
| opinion on whether something is true or false?
|
| Fact or fiction. Let your political direction decide.
|
| Surely removing fictious results should be a bonus for
| everyone?
|
| I give up. World has gone pure stone mad.
| luciusdomitius wrote:
| Even before that it was just a bing.com fronted. Now it is a
| censored bing.com frontend lol.
| p1necone wrote:
| Search results have to be "biased" towards being related to
| your query to be useful, I would argue that state sponsored
| Russian propaganda is probably not particularly related to most
| queries.
| kradeelav wrote:
| State-sponsored American propaganda during the War on Terror
| is pretty routinely denounced now as incorrect to what was
| going on, but during the active days would have been ranked
| higher in results in search engines, had this kind of thing
| been more popular then.
|
| (I say that as a former neocon too.)
| freediver wrote:
| 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 OK to
| be relevant to most queries and who is supposed to be the
| judge of that?
|
| The problem discussed here is not of search quality bias
| nature, but of political bias nature which should not have a
| place in a general web search engine.
| cutemonster wrote:
| 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.
| danShumway wrote:
| 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 political and who is supposed to be the judge
| of that?
|
| It seems to me that in order to have any web search engine
| of any real use, we necessarily have to accept that we are
| on some level ranking facts based on how relevant they are
| to queries, and we have to accept that we're going to try
| and strike a balance between neutrality and usefulness, and
| that different people/engines will have different ideas
| about what that balance is. Of course it would be better if
| consumers had more choices about different search engines
| to use in situations where they feel the rankings are bad,
| but... is it necessarily DuckDuckGo's fault that there
| aren't more search engines?
| freediver wrote:
| 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.
| danShumway wrote:
| > 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
|
| They don't have that capability. DuckDuckGo also doesn't
| have the capability to surface only correct JS code when
| I search for a programming concept. There isn't a binary
| here, all manual upranking and downranking of any content
| is always playing whack-a-mole, none of it is systemic or
| equally applied -- that's why it's manual and not
| automatic.
|
| DuckDuckGo tries to strike a balance between manually
| downranking misinformation that is obviously wrong, while
| being careful about downranking in less clear-cut
| situations. It is justifiable to critique them in whether
| or not they've done a good job of that, and it is
| definitely justifiable to ask about why they don't apply
| the same standards to certain other propaganda sources.
| But that's not how I originally read your comment: "The
| problem discussed here is not of search quality bias
| nature, but of political bias nature which should not
| have a place in a general web search engine."
|
| There's a big difference between saying that a specific
| search engine isn't doing a good job of stamping out all
| misinformation, or that it's being very selective about
| which misinformation it cares about, and saying that
| political content should be immune from ranking systems.
|
| ----
|
| > 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.
|
| You know that most search engines downrank non-English-
| language sources for you if you're located in America,
| right? They try to return results in languages that
| you're likely to be able to read.
|
| And search engines don't base rankings off of tlds
| because that would be trivial for adversaries to take
| advantage of by switching to upranked tlds. It's not at
| all comparable to deciding to downrank a news source.
| ipaddr wrote:
| "search engines don't base rankings off of tlds"
|
| Of course they do. By country: so .ca will rank better in
| Canada$and .in India by domain rank .com ranks higher
| than .biz
| freediver wrote:
| > It is justifiable to critique them in whether or not
| they've done a good job of that,
|
| If the announcement said "all disinformation about
| Russian-Ukraine conflict" it would grant benefit of a
| doubt about their execution as you point out. But it says
| "Russian disinformation" thus they are making it about
| politics (something a search engine should not be doing),
| not fighting disinformation (something a search engine
| should be doing), so we are justified to critique them on
| that basis.
|
| > You know that most search engines downrank non-English-
| language sources for you if you're located in America,
| right? They try to return results in languages that
| you're likely to be able to read.
|
| Correct. Because they can rightfully infer that the user
| is searching in english and likely wants results in
| english. However in this case, they are inferring a
| certain political view of the conflict, regardless of
| what your intent is (what if you are a Russian or Chinese
| DDG user, or simply someone who is agnostic and wants to
| read what all sides have to say to form a world view?).
| No basis for inference can be established here. The only
| way this could work is by having a switch in the
| interface to turn such results off, so the user can opt
| in into it if they prefer to.
| danShumway wrote:
| > But it says "Russian disinformation" thus they are
| making it about politics
|
| I don't follow. What specifically do you mean when you
| say the word "politics"? Do you mean that targeting a
| specific source of misinformation is political? That's
| literally all manual interventions, all of them target
| specific sources.
|
| > However in this case, they are inferring a certain
| political view of the conflict, regardless of what your
| intent is
|
| Well, or they're inferring that the information is
| factually wrong. Again, just very confused at what you
| mean by political here. When DuckDuckGo uses the word
| misinformation, what it means by that word is that
| DuckDuckGo thinks the information is factually incorrect,
| regardless of whether you are Russian or Chinese or
| American.
|
| If the DOJ comes out against encryption and says that it
| has a special chip that's safe enough for everyone, and
| then a researcher says, "no, I have broken the chip" --
| is that a political disagreement? If I block the DOJ
| source am I making a political statement, or am I saying
| that the DOJ's assertion in this case is factually wrong?
|
| Of course, sorting facts often has political
| implications, and it is fair to ask about what the
| political implications and viewpoints are that DuckDuckGo
| has, and whether it has biases that prevent it from
| reacting as strongly to, just as an example, US
| propaganda about refugees or armed conflicts that it has
| initiated. However, once again, asking critical questions
| about bias is not the same thing as saying that there is
| a nebulous category called "politics" where a private
| company who's job it is to sort information should never
| sort information.
|
| > No basis for inference can be established here. The
| only way this could work is by having a switch in the
| interface to turn such results off, so the user can opt
| in into it if they prefer to.
|
| It's hard to argue about this because on one hand, having
| more user controls around search would genuinely be good.
| However, this is not really how search works right now
| outside of rare situations like safe-search and location,
| and to argue that DuckDuckGo shouldn't be making any
| editorial decisions about political topics until full
| user-transparent customization of search algorithms exist
| -- it's effectively the same thing as arguing that no
| editorial decisions should be made right now.
|
| To me, this just kind of circles back around to what I
| was originally saying. Are you upset about a result-
| sorting business doing its job and sorting results, or
| are you upset with this very specific decision, or... is
| it possible you're just upset that we don't have a more
| competitive market for search engines?
| freediver wrote:
| > Do you mean that targeting a specific source of
| misinformation is political?
|
| In this particular case yes, proven by the fact that such
| source can only be 'Russian' by their definition.
|
| > Well, or they're inferring that the information is
| factually wrong.
|
| How would DDG do this even if they wanted? Send fact
| checkers to the ground?
|
| > When DuckDuckGo uses the word misinformation, what it
| means by that word is that DuckDuckGo thinks the
| information is factually incorrect, regardless of whether
| you are Russian or Chinese or American.
|
| I agree with the last part. The problem here is they are
| only expressing the intent to flag disinformation from
| one side as factually incorrect, and do not even bother
| to do so for disinformation coming from the other side,
| thus creating bias, which is political in nature for the
| reasons explained above.
|
| > To me, this just kind of circles back around to what I
| was originally saying. Are you upset about a result-
| sorting business doing its job and sorting results, or
| are you upset with this very specific decision, or... is
| it possible you're just upset that we don't have a more
| competitive market for search engines?
|
| Not upset at all, does my tone give out a different vibe?
| Sorry for that.
| danShumway wrote:
| > How would DDG do this even if they wanted? Send fact
| checkers to the ground?
|
| If you want DDG to independently verify every decision it
| makes via primary sources, you are going to get less
| useful search results. DuckDuckGo doesn't have a team of
| scientists to reproduce every research paper they see.
| Nevertheless, they can decide to intervene in situations
| where they are reasonably certain that a source isn't
| trustworthy.
|
| Of course, people are free to disagree with them. Is the
| disagreement here that people think they're blocking
| sites that aren't misinformation? That's difficult to
| debate given that we don't know the list of sites, but my
| personal priors are that the sites probably aren't the
| victims of smear-campaigns, they probably are peddling
| deliberate misinformation. Hard to debate one way or
| another if we don't know the list; but once again,
| arguing that DuckDuckGo is wrong about whether these
| sources are trustworthy is not the same as saying that
| they shouldn't be able to downrank a bad news source
| without first forming their own team of investigative
| journalists.
|
| ----
|
| > I agree. The problem here is they are only flagging
| disinformation from one side as factually incorrect, and
| do not even bother to do so for disinformation coming
| from the other side, thus creating bias, which is
| political in nature for the reasons explained above.
|
| So, there's two things here:
|
| First, yes, search engines have bias for the same reason
| that all ranking systems have bias. Remember that
| DuckDuckGo is literally in the business of ranking
| certain sites above other sites. There is no one in the
| world and no algorithm that is capable of ranking
| information without incorporating some degree of
| worldview into that decision about how rankings should
| work. This bias is _why_ we use search engines, and it 's
| why diversity in search engines would be a good thing. We
| want sorting systems to have opinions about how
| information should be sorted.
|
| This is still very difficult to talk about when the word
| "political" is being used in such a broad sense. Do you
| mean political in the sense that all editorial decisions
| are political by nature because they either reinforce or
| question a status quo? Or do you mean political in a more
| narrow way -- that applying more strict standards to a
| subgroup of sources is the thing that makes this
| political? If you mean "political" in a broad sense, then
| sure, I agree, but also there's no such thing as a web
| search engine that is apolitical in that broad sense and
| I question whether it's possible to build one that is
| apolitical without also being completely useless for most
| users. If you mean political in the second sense, that
| there is a narrow category of political topics and the
| lack of fairness is the thing that makes it political...
| again, I just don't understand how you square that with
| the regular filtering that search engines do all the
| time.
|
| When Google Ads pay special attention to ads for
| lockpickers because it's a popular spam category of ad,
| but they don't pay special attention to other ads to the
| same degree, is that suddenly political?
|
| Second issue I have here, if the problem is a lack of
| flagging misinformation in other contexts, why would the
| answer not be more rigorous flagging of that
| misinformation? Why would the answer necessarily be that
| DuckDuckGo results should be a free-for-all whenever
| someone searches for the word Ukraine? There's a big jump
| here from, "I think they're not doing a thorough enough
| job and I think they're taking sides in a conflict" to
| "they shouldn't be even trying to do this at all".
|
| There are some services where that viewpoint makes sense,
| but I don't see how DDG is one of them. I personally have
| argued that companies like Cloudflare fundamentally
| shouldn't be in the business of releasing content filters
| at all. I personally have argued that TLDs shouldn't be
| involved in censorship. I have personally argued that
| ISPs should not be allowed to filter content that is not
| illegal. Important difference, none of those are
| companies whose primary service is sorting content, none
| of them are companies that we go to with the explicit
| request for them to give us information based on what
| they think is relevant and accurate.
|
| How do you make the jump from disapproval of DDG's
| standard for misinformation and how it's applied to the
| idea that they shouldn't be involved in filtering of
| misinformation at all?
|
| ----
|
| TLDR, I still don't really understand why editorial
| decisions about political content is a slippery slope,
| but _abandoning_ editorial decisions based on a word (
| "political") that doesn't seem particularly rigorously
| defined isn't also a slippery slope.
| freediver wrote:
| > How do you make the jump from disapproval of DDG's
| standard for misinformation and how it's applied to the
| idea that they shouldn't be involved in filtering of
| misinformation at all?
|
| It is quite easy to disapprove their current standard on
| record because according to it, misinformation can be
| coming from a "Russian" source only and we all know there
| is much more misinformation in the world than that. Can
| we agree on this?
|
| I am not saying that a search engine shouldn't be
| involved in filtering of misinformation. On the contrary,
| I think that DDG (and any other search engine) should
| absolutely be in the business of filtering all
| misinformation they can. Key here is "all".
|
| But by being selective, and in this case based on a
| particular political view (and I use the word political
| in the context of world politics), introduces a bias
| which may negatively affect its users, without any
| particular benefit.
|
| Makes sense?
| danShumway wrote:
| Sure. I think it's reasonable to ask DuckDuckGo to apply
| more rigorous standards across the board.
|
| I'll offer a weak note in their defense that I suspect
| part of the reason they don't is specifically to avoid
| sliding down a slippery slope and breaking this balance
| between neutrality and editorial decisions about content.
| I suspect that DuckDuckGo would say that there is a
| volume and kind of misinformation happening here that
| they are willing to address, but that applying the
| standards too broadly would result in them making
| decisions in other contexts where they feel less
| confident and in pushing their editorial line too far.
|
| However, I don't think it's unreasonable at all to
| disagree with them on that assessment, and I think it's
| extremely reasonable to ask why DuckDuckGo feels safer
| about downranking certain kinds of misinformation and
| feels nervous about taking stances about other
| misinformation.
|
| My hope is that if it's somehow possible for anything
| positive at all to come out of Russia's invasion of
| Ukraine, it's in part that people become more
| conscientious and critical about other conflicts (and
| narratives about conflicts) that we tend to take for
| granted or ignore.
| CactusOnFire wrote:
| 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).
| freediver wrote:
| 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.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| That comment shouldn't have aged well one nanosecond after it
| was posted.
|
| Search results _are_ bias. The entire _idea_ of a "search
| engine" is to bias the set of all possible data in the crawled
| universe to select for the information you're searching for,
| then sort that information by "likeliest to be what you wanted"
| because the interface can't just cram all the results straight
| into your brain.
|
| ... and the company writing the search engine is _always_ the
| final arbiter of what that means in implementation.
|
| In this specific case, DDG is announcing they are aware of some
| sites where the information is likely to be untrue and they're
| downranking it on account of it being a datasource unlikely to
| deliver what the user wants. That's their job, in exactly the
| same sense that it's their job to figure out that when I search
| for "hacker news" I mean this site and not the r/hackernews
| Reddit mirror.
| kube-system wrote:
| "unbiased" doesn't mean "unfiltered". For example, I don't want
| spam or malware in my search results.
|
| Search results should return good information that is relevant
| to your query, and filter out anything that is not that.
| JasonFruit wrote:
| When a search provider decides to allow one side of a story
| to be presented but to remove sites that present the other
| side, that's pure bias. It may be _justifiable_ bias; that 's
| arguable. But you can't call that unbiased by any sensible
| definition.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| But that's not what DDG is claiming to be doing. They're
| claiming to remove outright falsehoods, not anything that
| could be considered favorable to the russian position.
| dylan604 wrote:
| What if I'm doing research on the specific types of
| misinformation?
|
| I don't want results of sites telling me the misinformation
| is going on, but I want the actual bits of misinformation for
| proper attribution.
|
| There's always edge cases
| kube-system wrote:
| You'll have the same challenges as the people who are
| researching spam or malware. I could see a use-case for a
| niche product that specifically doesn't filter bad results,
| but I'm pretty sure DDG wants to be a general-purpose
| search engine first.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| If it's not appearing in the searches then it's not "going
| on".
|
| If you're looking for what specific sites are saying, you
| can still do that.
| eli wrote:
| If you search "Ukraine news RT" on DDG you get Ukraine news
| from RT. It's still there if you look for it. It just isn't
| near the top of a "Ukraine news" query (I assume you'd find
| it there eventually if you scroll enough)
| willcipriano wrote:
| All you have to do is scroll past the US misinformation,
| on past EU misinformation and you'll find it right there.
| Easy.
| eli wrote:
| Sorry but it just isn't the same. Russia made it illegal
| -- punishable by 15 years in prison -- to accurately
| describe their invasion of Ukraine.
| [deleted]
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| I'm not in Russia and DDG isn't limiting their distortion
| to Russian visitors to their site.
| kube-system wrote:
| They weren't suggesting otherwise. They were suggesting
| that Russia's disinformation campaign has been
| particularly egregious and intentional.
| mardifoufs wrote:
| I think you can go to jail for supporting the russian
| invasion in some european countries right now too.
| pvaldes wrote:
| If supporting means driving a tank in Berlin and bombing
| an hospital, yes, most probably you will go to jail.
|
| For a long, long, time.
|
| If it means saying that Russia is right, definitely not.
| bhandziuk wrote:
| Is there a source for this?
| dane-pgp wrote:
| I'll just do a quick search on DDG for that...
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| https://twitter.com/tjmcintyre/status/1501594050478153739
| mardifoufs wrote:
| This is what the ukrainian embassy in slovakia claimed. I
| guess official ukrainian sources have been incredibly
| unreliable but I haven't seen any fact check on their
| claims
|
| >Czech law enforcement warns that public approval of
| Russia's invasion of Ukraine could be classified as a
| "crime of denial, questioning, approval and justification
| of GENOCIDE." There are already the first two cases of
| detainees incriminated in this paragraph of the Criminal
| Code.
|
| https://twitter.com/UKRinCZE/status/1497829641171525634
| joe_the_user wrote:
| _" unbiased" doesn't mean "unfiltered"._
|
| What else can a filter be aside from a bias? Clearly, I'd
| want a search engine that's biased against spam and generally
| against "automatically generated" content.
|
| It's hard for people to wrap their heads around how many
| search judgements are inherently editorial decisions - and
| how much of this is OK. One factor is that mainstream
| American news, from Hearst to the NY Times spent a long
| indoctrinating people on the claim that their position in the
| political spectrum was "balanced" where everything else was
| "extreme".
|
| One actually useful thing a search engine could do is allow
| it's users to see it's biases and even configure their
| particular preferred filters - within reason. Could be a
| selling point.
| gruez wrote:
| > "unbiased" doesn't mean "unfiltered". For example, I don't
| want spam or malware in my search results.
|
| That seems like a cop-out to me. They're not filtering "spam
| or malware", they're filtering "Russian disinformation".
| What's next? Maybe OAN is "right-wing disinformation" and we
| should "filter" that too? What about fox news? How far can
| you use that excuse to say you're not biased?
| remless wrote:
| If I search cure for cancer the pro bleach crowed will be
| annoyed that bleach doesn't comes up before chemotherapy.
| I'm assuming you haven't actually looked at the
| disinformation that Russian propagandists are putting out.
| They aren't just saying "Russia is justified in ensuring
| the independence of areas with people who consider
| themselves traditionally Soviets" this is "Ukraine is
| bombing itself to make Russia look bad".
|
| If you're arguing search engines should bias for what you
| want to see then it shouldn't be ranking russian propaganda
| highly for western audiences, if you are arguing search
| engines should bias for facts then by definition it
| shouldn't be ranking russian propaganda highly.
| kube-system wrote:
| You have rediscovered why it is difficult to make a search
| engine. This is a problem that applies to all search
| results, not just politically charged content: human
| judgement is always required to write a search algorithm.
| gruez wrote:
| So where does that leave us? Everything is biased? What
| does that mean when applied to duckduckgo's tweet from
| 2019? It's just a hollow slogan? I'm not sure that
| changes the conclusion much. The first impression I got
| from reading the comment was that the tweet from 2019 was
| a hollow PR message that they don't stand behind.
| kube-system wrote:
| > So where does that leave us? Everything is biased?
|
| Yes, humans have biases. There's not a way around it.
|
| > What does that mean when applied to duckduckgo's tweet
| from 2019?
|
| Yes, that tweet is obviously a vague marketing message,
| but if you read the entire quote in context, it was in
| reference to _filter-bubble biases_. It wasn 't a claim
| that DDG employees are somehow superhuman creatures
| immune to human biases. Obviously that's a ridiculous
| interpretation.
|
| Here's the source, in context:
|
| https://spreadprivacy.com/why-use-duckduckgo-instead-of-
| goog...
| yifanl wrote:
| > So where does that leave us? Everything is biased?
|
| Search results are created by humans and intended to be
| consumed by humans, so yes. (And just to head it off, a
| web crawler is ultimately just an abstraction for the
| humans who will later consume the search results, it just
| happens to have particularly fast and strict browsing
| habits)
|
| Now that said, accepting that "(un)biased" is an
| extremely broad term, I'd very easily believe that the
| intent of the tweet was to point at some specific type of
| bias that DDG (at the time) intended to avoid.
| verisimi wrote:
| No - they are explicitly adding bias here. They are
| coding it into their algorithm.
|
| Frankly, I'd be surprised if there weren't implicit
| biases already there.
|
| But this is something new. Its overt, explicit.
| verve_rat wrote:
| > "Russian disinformation"
|
| Which is spam.
| smsm42 wrote:
| "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 trust it again. Which information is "good"? If a hundred
| newspapers publish the same article because they are all
| owned by the same company which told them to - is it "spam"?
| If a hundred TV anchors all read the same message while
| pretending it's local news - is it "spam"?
|
| I am not saying there's nothing to be done here - but let's
| not pretend it's easy and obvious and there's some objective
| way to see what's "good information" that does not involve a
| lot of human judgement and a lot of bias that comes with it.
| kube-system wrote:
| Determining which search results are good to return is the
| hard part about creating a search engine, and it's
| definitely not a problem limited to politically charged
| content.
| smsm42 wrote:
| Having worked on search engines, I know it only too well.
| Defining "good result" is a very complex task, that even
| without politics intruding involves a lot of judgement
| and very complex and un-obvious choices. Is good result
| something people would frequently click on? Then
| clickbait would be the best search results ever - do we
| really want this? Is it something a lot of people search
| for? Is it a popular site? Is it a site belonging to a
| large advertiser? And when politics comes to it, it
| becomes a mess. So pretending it's clear and obvious -
| just remove "bad results" and show "good results" - is
| really not understanding the problem.
| KarlKemp wrote:
| You are listing a bunch of methods that might be useful
| indicators of "good content", useful for search engine
| algorithms. But those are merely (possible) symptoms.
| "Good" is a quality of the content itself, made up of
| factors such as relevancy, accuracy, completeness,
| readability etc. Nobody said it was necessarily easy to
| judge these things, especially at scale. But that doesn't
| mean that it doesn't exist.
| awb wrote:
| > "Good" is a quality of the content itself, made up of
| factors such as relevancy, accuracy, completeness,
| readability etc.
|
| It's impossible to quantify a rating based on these
| subjective qualities you listed. I think the point is you
| can't remove the human element from ranking search
| results without leaving the search engine open to
| exploitation.
| KarlKemp wrote:
| "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.
| kube-system wrote:
| > "Good information", almost synonymous with "truth"
|
| Truth gets you about 1% of the way towards returning
| "good information". What are the ideal search results for
| "orange"?
| kelnos wrote:
| This one is actually easy. Most commonly, orange is a
| color and a fruit. I'm sure we can all pretty easily list
| some objective facts about both of those things.
|
| Orange is also the name of a town in some places, and a
| county in others. But I think you need more search terms
| in order to disambiguate. The search engine can't read
| minds, after all.
| kube-system wrote:
| Maybe the user was actually looking to pay their phone
| bill? (The first result in DDG is orange.fr, not the
| color or the fruit)
|
| My point is, there's no objective way to determine what
| good search results are. There are thousands of different
| objective measurements which people combine in subjective
| ways to create a subjective algorithm.
| kelnos wrote:
| Absolutely, but then who is responsible for judging what
| is true and what is false? And why should I trust those
| people not only to be correct all the time, but also to
| never fall victim to their own biases when making these
| decisions?
|
| The point is that there is no such thing as a perfect
| arbiter of truth. I may trust a friend with whom I have a
| close personal relationship to always tell me the truth,
| but it seems foolish to place that kind of trust in a
| corporation full of people you don't know.
|
| In the end, we're back to just not filtering information
| at all, but instead leaving it up to each individual to
| decide what's true and which isn't. This also clearly has
| not worked. Maybe this problem is just not solvable.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| _" Good information", almost synonymous with "truth", is
| not subjective._
|
| Truth is "not subjective" in the sense that force of will
| can't change the answer to even very fraught questions
| like "what programming paradigm works best in situation
| X" or "which running back would do best on team X in
| superbowl Y".
|
| But one's judgement on the truth of complex question
| depends on one's opinions on the meaning of various
| terms, reliability of various individuals, the dynamics
| of human psychology, etc. This overall situation results
| in people's opinions being hard to compare and "truth is
| subjective" is often shorthand for this, although it
| would be nicer to have a different word.
| qiskit wrote:
| > Search results should return good information that is
| relevant to your query
|
| Then they would also filter ukrainian, NATO, EU, US, etc
| disinformation. Almost all the disinformation that you see on
| social media ( western ) is ukrainian, NATO, EU, US, etc
| disinformation since russia has self-isolated itself to some
| degree and much of russian media/propaganda has been banned.
|
| If DDG said we will down-rank sites associated with Ukranian,
| NATO, US disinformation, then maybe we could give them a
| benefit of the doubt.
| adventured wrote:
| Not all disinformation is created equal, and that's a
| critical difference.
|
| The Russian and Ukrainian sides are not moral equals.
|
| If Russia says Ukraine is full of drug addicts, whores and
| nazis, and that bombing hospitals is necessary to protect
| itself from Ukraine - that's of course disinformation.
|
| If Ukraine says they have killed 10,000 Russian soldiers,
| when the real number is closer to 5,000 - that too is
| disinformation (exaggeration) and I'm not interested in
| seeing it strictly censored for multiple reasons. 1) It's
| not a radical exaggeration, such as claiming they've killed
| 250,000 soldiers or entirely stopped the Russian assault;
| and 2) it contains quite interesting information: a claim
| of significant invader deaths (from the supposedly mighty
| Russian military), which prompts inquiry as to just how bad
| Russia is fairing. While Ukraine for example has
| exaggerated their successes, their successes have been
| remarkable and have shown Russia to be mismanaged,
| incompetent, weak, and everything else one would expect of
| a typical authoritarian regime - it looks like a duck, it
| quacks like a duck, and how wonderful it is a duck.
| Probably the most remarkable thing about Putin's Russia -
| considering the kleptocracy - was that it had supposedly
| managed to maintain a very potent, mostly competent
| military, which is unusual for such a long authoritarian
| slog. That turned out to be false, Putin is wildly
| incompetent as are most authoritarians historically. He's
| no different than what we've seen in the past with other
| strong-man dictatorships like Hussein (also a paper tiger
| military, no coincidence the US chewed through their
| mediocre Soviet hardware too).
|
| Not all disinformation provides anything valuable to the
| context as far as anti-fog-of-war information goes. Some
| disinformation is particularly worthless garbage. Plenty of
| what Ukraine is revealing does reveal valuable information,
| whereas very little of what Russia has been saying does the
| same.
|
| And morally I'm not interested in Russia winning. I'm
| interested in Russia losing in humiliating fashion, getting
| isolated, having its economy chopped down by 75%, and in
| the coming decades seeing the nation split into three or
| four countries and overall massively weakened to prevent
| the Russian empire from attempting to emerge again with the
| next Putin that must inherently follow from their culture
| of power and conquest lust.
|
| I'm no more interested in leveling the playing field for
| Russia as I would be for Nazi Germany. They're increasingly
| similar monsters, and Putin is only likely to get worse as
| time continues on. The absolute last thing the West should
| do is treat Ukraine and Russia similarly. We should do
| whatever it takes to defeat Russia, including winning the
| propaganda war - the only alternative is to vacate that
| space to Russia (a neutral outcome in propaganda is next to
| impossible).
| skinnymuch wrote:
| Forget leveling the playing field. Removing western
| disinformation is still important too. Forget specific
| positives or disinformation about Russia specifically
| attacking Ukraine. There's plenty of other misinformation
| from western powers relating to Russia. I haven't seen
| much chatter at all about the western specifically
| America's role in what Russia is today. How often is the
| IMF and related neoliberal capitalist/imperialist
| intervention in Russia, starting the second the USSR
| dissolved, brought up?
|
| This is important stuff to know. I did a few sample
| searches. The results aren't wrong. They are incredibly
| dry. Many being direct studies and long PDFs. People
| aren't going to go through that stuff when seeing how
| Russia is getting rekt or Ukraine is suffering or gas
| prices are up are consumable via many pics, quick takes,
| social media takes, and more.
|
| I think it's important also because of your wording.
| Russia being the kleptocracy. You didn't say the west
| isn't. It is heavily implied IMO though.
|
| Another unfortunate issue is this all will cloud the west
| in even more misinformation. The best non dense news
| knowledge from TV I gained regarding Yemen was from RT.
| The west is awful at covering the tragedy there. Not to
| mention complicit too. RT was slanted ofc. Not saying
| that's what should be aimed for.
|
| Similarly if Russian economy collapsing by 75% and
| screwing with the lives of 100M avg Russians as it splits
| into 3 or 4 is something to aim for. The non mention of
| NATO being a pointless organization today but especially
| in a collapsed Russia world would be good to know. That
| info won't be given out much I presume. Also to note. No
| one really suffers remotely like 100M+ Russians if NATO
| disbanded. Though I'm sure the massive amt of
| misinformation when the west doesn't want to keep helping
| out the millions of Russian refugees in your dreamt
| future will be absolutely insane. Just like relatively
| minor amounts of refugees now keep getting called things
| like the migrant crisis.
|
| Russia should not be hurting and killing Ukrainians.
| America and others should not be helping Yemen or
| Palestine or other places have innocents suffering or
| killed. Most of all, we shouldn't get ourselves into a
| state where we keep patting ourselves on the back and
| pointing to boogeymen to escape culpability. Which is
| pretty much guaranteed in a future of a collapsed Russia
| with millions of refugees that NATO will have little
| interest in helping but will engage in a massive amt of
| misinformation to escape the very obvious moral failings.
| At least this is all almost certain to happen based on
| the present (excluding the help Ukrainian refugees are
| getting which may be proving the pt more by being such a
| markedly unique exception) and past.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| I agree that the two sides aren't morally equal. However,
| that doesn't mean that more moral disinformation is less
| so disinformation, and choosing to let one over the other
| is being biased.
|
| You could argue however that this a good bias to have,
| and that's definitely a discussion that deserves to be
| had and where I'm personally not decided. However, it's
| good to agree that this is indeed a bias beforehand.
| vogre wrote:
| >If Russia says ... that bombing hospitals is necessary
| to protect itself from Ukraine - that's of course
| disinformation.
|
| Actually this story is really "wag the dog" style
| https://waronfakes.com/civil/fake-russian-aviation-
| struck-a-...
|
| Every story you read now is propaganda. West is just
| better and more experienced in this stuff than Russia.
|
| >I'm interested in Russia losing in humiliating fashion,
| getting isolated, having its economy chopped down by 75%,
| and in the coming decades seeing the nation split into
| three or four countries and overall massively weakened
|
| This scenario includes about 150 millions of people
| dead/suffering and world economy wrecked. How is this
| "moral"?
| JamisonM wrote:
| It sure seems like that "war on fakes" site is full on
| non-debunkings of things.
|
| This article for example is just re-printing Russian
| government talking points:
|
| https://waronfakes.com/civil/fake-russian-soldiers-wont-
| let-...
|
| Which is fine, the authors can believe the Russian
| government if you want, but declaring the statements of
| the other side "fake" on only that basis isn't very
| credible.
| sidibe wrote:
| >Every story you read now is propaganda. West is just
| better and more experienced in this stuff than Russia
|
| You have such a good eye for propaganda! Congrats. Thanks
| for the education I will make waronfakes.com my homepage.
| From flipping link to link it looks perfectly fine,
| covers everything from all parties: Ukraine lying, NATO
| lying, lies about Russia lying, lies about DNR/LNR.
| Perfectly balanced
| slim wrote:
| it would be unbiased if they weren't specifically targeting
| russian disinformation
| kyle_martin1 wrote:
| danShumway wrote:
| The entire quote in context:
|
| > "[W]hen you search, you expect unbiased results, but that's
| not what you get on Google," Gabriel Weinberg, founder of
| DuckDuckGo, a privacy-focused search engine, writes on Quora.
| "On Google, you get results tailored to what they think you're
| likely to click on, based on the data profile they've built on
| you over time."
|
| "Unbiased" is a bad word to use, but what they were getting at
| is that Google tailors search results per-person based on a
| data profile. I don't see how anyone even at the time thought
| that this meant that DuckDuckGo was not ranking sites, that's
| what a search engine does.
|
| I genuinely don't understand the controversy at all about this.
| "Who determines what is misinformation" is an argument for
| search engine diversity, not for destroying the entire concept
| of a search engine. Of course DuckDuckGo downranks and upranks
| sites.
|
| The real controversy here is why after all of these years they
| still haven't gotten around to downranking W3Schools.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| I assume it's the "law of conservation of expertsexchange."
|
| They don't downrank w3schools because something will just
| replace it. ;)
| giantrobot wrote:
| I still can't read that site name as anything but "expert
| sex change".
| WheatM wrote:
| ColinHayhurst wrote:
| To what extent does their agreement with Microsoft allow them
| to change rankings? Will Ecosia, Qwant, Yahoo! and so on be
| doing, or have to do, the same?
| mrweasel wrote:
| As I understand it, based on previous comments on HN they can
| change ranking and inject results from their crawler into the
| search. The assumption that it's just Bing comes which a
| bunch of asteriskes.
| moralestapia wrote:
| Just your typical unscrupulous guy making money by any means
| necessary.
|
| Changing views faster than a weather vane, always pointing to
| where a few crumbs of bread may fall.
|
| Sad.
| hedora wrote:
| 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?
| freediver wrote:
| Out of curiosity, what are the reliable news outlets that you
| subscribe to?
| pydry wrote:
| >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.
|
| If western news outlets focused a little more on actually
| being reliable and objective maybe people wouldnt lose
| confidence.
|
| I hardly think Russian propaganda is required for people to
| do this.
| qiskit wrote:
| Is anyone really that surprised? Beware companies that sell
| virtue. They tend to be the least virtuous. Don't be evil? Easily
| one of the most evil companies to have ever existed. When DDG's
| prime selling point was not their service but their "virtue", you
| knew it was a shady company. Though I do hope DDG, Bing, etc are
| able to gain some market share to break google's stranglehold on
| search, DDG is at heart no better than google morally. They are
| out to make a buck, nothing more, nothing less, like google. If
| you think DDG cares one lick about your privacy or free speech,
| then you are fooling yourself.
| myth_drannon wrote:
| Any alternatives? Open source search...?
| timeon wrote:
| Alternatives? like you are really longing for lies?
| ummonk wrote:
| I want to see what RT and Sputnik News are saying. And the
| misinformation published by them is no more common than the
| misinformation published by mainstream media sources.
| myth_drannon wrote:
| I don't want others decide for me what is truth and what is
| lie. Others become corrupt, compromised (did it go well for
| Russians?).
| Imnimo wrote:
| 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, but they are now
| factually incorrect.
|
| Should I simply accept that this site is the correct top result
| for my users' queries, since it has been ranked by my unbiased
| algorithm? Or should I decide to put my finger on the scale, and
| redesign my algorithm (possibly by simply reweighting results
| from this particular site) to change the rankings?
|
| Does the answer change if the site is not a prank site, but is
| propoganda? Or an earnest-but-incorrect flat earther?
| ricardo81 wrote:
| > contains authoritative-sounding but incorrect answers to
| common questions. The results returned are still relevant to my
| users, but they are now factually incorrect.
|
| IMO the difference is between web-wide decisions vs something
| else. DDG have stated they're specifically targetting something
| beyond web pages.
|
| If DDG has some way of measuring "misinformation" then fair
| play, we can assume it isn't specific to Russia because it'd be
| a universal solution.
|
| Some sort of decree from the CEO about what is true and what is
| not just sounds dangerous. We might not fully understand
| automation, as in all search engines, but it's a safe wager
| that he doesn't understand it any better otherwise he would've
| coded it in already and it'd be a non-story for the searchers
| of the world.
| Imnimo wrote:
| So if I could only detect this one prank site, but did not
| have a way to detect and downrank all prank sites at once,
| you would say it's invalid for me to just take action against
| the one I know about, since that's not a universal solution?
| ricardo81 wrote:
| define prank.
|
| dictionary definition (according to Google)
|
| >a practical joke or mischievous act.
|
| Maybe if that's the definition then all Twitter parody
| accounts need to be removed. Would you agree?
| Imnimo wrote:
| Well that depends. If my position were that you have to
| act via "web-wide decisions" and "universal solutions",
| then I might conclude that my only options were to leave
| up all prank sites, including those damaging the
| usefulness of my search results, or remove everything
| including harmless parody accounts.
|
| On the other hand, if I were to accept that it's valid to
| target individual sites or subsets of sites only as they
| become a problem, then I might conclude that removing
| this one troublesome prank site that is pointing my users
| to bad information does not require me to take action
| against random twitter parody accounts.
| ricardo81 wrote:
| > I might conclude that my only options
|
| I guess the point is that you were able to conclude that
| in the first place. You concluded there are options. An
| algorithm/decision removing one side of it means you do
| not, more so if you do not even get to understand why
| that choice was removed when you're making that choice.
| kkjjkgjjgg wrote:
| 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. On the other hand, maybe I
| want to see what all the fuss is about - then why should the
| search engine stand in my way?
| bena wrote:
| I think you're framing the discussion in the wrong way.
|
| Yes, if you're looking for "Russian Disinformation", you
| should be able to find it.
|
| But if I'm looking for "U.S. midterm elections", I shouldn't
| get Russian disinformation.
|
| What is the problem with modifying the algorithm to favor
| actual information over disinformation? Or sites that are
| known to propagate disinformation?
|
| The only thing I could say is that it's weirdly specific to
| Russian disinformation. Disinformation should be disfavored
| no matter the country of origin.
| username3 wrote:
| I shouldn't get American disinformation, but your trusted
| sources are untouchable.
| moltke wrote:
| >Should I simply accept that this site is the correct top
| result for my users' queries,
|
| Yes, your users aren't using your search engine as an oracle
| for the truth, they're using it to find pages with similar
| text. It's their job (and specifically not yours) to determine
| how well the text they find corresponds with reality. Perhaps
| they're even aware the site is factually incorrect and enjoy
| reading it for the novelty, perhaps they want to cite it to
| warn others that sometimes things online are wrong. You have no
| idea what the people are doing with the information.
|
| Google has started censoring their results because they decided
| people should use their search engine as a truth oracle (with
| the results you would expect, lets not forget the "when did
| George Washington go to the moon" thing from a year or so ago.)
| I think that's a mistake and is a large part of the reason I
| use DuckDuckGo.
|
| You may have caught this one instance but there are likely an
| unlimited number of others. You're not going to catch
| everything and you make your search engine worse with every
| exception you make to the algorithm.
| helen___keller wrote:
| > Yes, your users aren't using your search engine as an
| oracle for the truth, they're using it to find pages with
| similar text.
|
| I'm confident this is factually incorrect for a very very
| large subset of searches. Probably a majority.
| moltke wrote:
| It's _never_ going to work for that though. This is like
| changing a hammer design because some people are hurting
| themselves using it as a comb.
| helen___keller wrote:
| 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.loc.gov/item/today-in-history/february-12"
|
| Obviously I'm aware that not all data is uncontroversial
| and agreed upon, but it's a fact that a large percentage
| of searches are quite literally treating search engines
| as oracles of truth
| moltke wrote:
| >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...
| yupper32 wrote:
| "The Covid vaccine doesn't prevent deaths 100% of the
| time. So it does not work."
|
| Something doesn't need to be perfect to work well.
| Arnavion wrote:
| 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 )
| stale2002 wrote:
| > It does not.
|
| In the "Abraham Lincoln's birthday" example that the
| person gave, it absolutely does work that way in regards
| to the user's motivations.
|
| When a user googles for "Abraham Lincoln's birthday" They
| are almost certainly attempting to use a search engine as
| an oracle of truth.
|
| > that still yields factually incorrect results
|
| Search engines aren't perfect. That does not change the
| fact that the oracle of truth model, is a good model to
| describe a user's motivations.
|
| Such as when they google "Abraham Lincoln's birthday".
| Arnavion wrote:
| helen___keller wrote:
|
| >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.loc.gov/item/today-in-history/february-12"
|
| But this is a false dichotomy. There are more options
| than either an infobox that says "February 12, 1809" and
| a "February 12 in history" page. I think you can agree
| that a link to the Wikipedia article on Abraham Lincoln
| will be a fine search result. At most the search engine
| needs to be smart enough to match "birthday" in the
| search query against variations of "born on" that are
| present in the article.
| spoils19 wrote:
| Could you source what you're basing your facts on? I know
| many people like myself are just looking to expand on the
| text we're searching for, and letting the free market
| decide what's a good search result.
| helen___keller wrote:
| The best supporting data is the rise in no-click
| searches. See https://sparktoro.com/blog/in-2020-two-
| thirds-of-google-sear...
|
| No-click searches continue to grow in share while google
| continues to adopt design that presents information
| outside a traditional link, like a weather widget or the
| fact you were looking for presented at the top in large
| text outside the scope of a link.
|
| This suggests a growing share of searches weren't looking
| for links in the first place, they were looking for
| information and when the search engine provided that
| information, the user left without clicking a link
| awb wrote:
| I'm rarely an expert on the broad keywords I search for.
| That's why I'm searching: to learn.
|
| I would use a search engine that makes some attempt to rank
| higher quality, more accurate information higher than others.
| Imnimo wrote:
| >they're using it to find pages with similar text.
|
| This is one vision of what a search engine's job is, but I'm
| not sure it's what most users are looking for. Even barebones
| pagerank goes far beyond just finding similar text - it uses
| structure of the web's link graph to estimate the quality of
| a page. Now obviously pagerank is not directly trying to
| ascertain which pages are truthful and which are not, but it
| is arguably using connectedness as a proxy - the assumption
| is that people tend to link to reliable, useful pages and
| tend not to link to incorrect, harmful ones.
|
| Does vanilla pagerank also violate your boundaries for what a
| search engine should do?
| colinmhayes wrote:
| > Yes, your users aren't using your search engine as an
| oracle for the truth, they're using it to find pages with
| similar text.
|
| The reason google removes factually incorrect results is
| because this is actually exactly what the vast majority of
| people use search engines for.
| goatcode wrote:
| What would you direct searches for "strawman" to?
| ploppyploppy wrote:
| I will now stop using DDG because of this.
| hammock wrote:
| There's really nowhere reliable on the web you can get non-
| Western sanctioned news about the Russia-Ukraine conflict. If you
| are interested in alternative viewpoints, don't bother with any
| of the search engines. All the sources I've seen are on, e.g.
| Telegram.
| jnsaff2 wrote:
| Aljazeera?
| boplicity wrote:
| South China Morning Post, Al Jazeera. I'm sure there are
| others.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| This is an odd viewpoint. To me, "news" means "what is
| happening". I'm aware that the American news media does tend to
| mix a fairly heavy dose of opinion into that, but that isn't
| your only choice. The wire services like AP, or non-US news
| organizations like the BBC or Japan's NHK provide alternatives.
|
| But these aren't "alternative viewpoints". They're just news
| with less opinion. Are you actually looking for news? Or
| different opinions?
| yurish wrote:
| News may be filtered to create skewed view. Note that the
| "alternatives" you list are all from US or its allies.
| myth_drannon wrote:
| Censorship on Google Search, Youtube didn't start with the
| Russian invasion. It started with the need to counter Trump. Very
| scary times.
|
| ,,He who fights too long against dragons becomes a dragon
| himself; and if you gaze too long into the abyss, the abyss will
| gaze into you." -- Friedrich Nietzsche, book Beyond Good and Evil
| Minor49er wrote:
| It started long before Trump. Here is a list of just a few
| examples:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_Google
| myth_drannon wrote:
| Right, but before it was done mostly secretly, with shame.
| Now censorship is normalized and announced proudly.
| Minor49er wrote:
| I would argue that most of it is still secret, or at least
| not widely known about. They're only announcing this
| particular censorship because it falls in line with popular
| current events
| thepasswordis wrote:
| If I search for "yandex" on DDG, the russian search engine is the
| first thing that comes up, so...
| ploppyploppy wrote:
| Bad move. They could have used this to inform the user instead
| they broke their core philosophy. Very unhappy.
| wooque wrote:
| To be honest age of DuckDuckGo as alternative search engine is
| over.
|
| I switched to Brave Search and not going back. It's giving me
| better results, along with quick Google link to jump to Google if
| needed (instead of manually typing !g before result). And they
| maintain own independent search index compared to DuckDuckGo,
| which gets most of it's results from Bing.
| doitLP wrote:
| Their results are scraped from users using Google so I wouldn't
| call it independent and I wonder how long it will last.
| sshine wrote:
| Like Signal, I approve of DuckDuckGo generally, and sometimes
| they make bad moves.
|
| This is one of them.
|
| Censoring the baddies may seem obvious, but once you open this
| can of worms, there's no closing it.
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