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Comment by giaour | Hacker News Reader

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.

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Thank you! This really needed to be said. This is about political SEO Spam nothing else.

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)

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

When you downgrade one site another site is upranked.

If you have a basic result

1. Good 2. Bad 3. Good

And downrank the propaganda, the #3 result will now be #2. This is up ranking the good by default.

Info from both sides are supposed to go viral. Why does that part matter?

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.

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.

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).

The people writing the search algorithms decide, just like they decide what a "good" algorithm is.

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.

Your assertion is not falsifiable, but I would otherwise take the other side of that bet.

Sure it is. We can ask @yegg about their methodology

Its exactly what happened to Qwant so it's not far fetched.

That is most likely what happened and the naivety around it is annoying.

It seems more naive to think search algorithms are ever "unbiased". The whole point is to find something by ranking them and applying a bias.

I kinda doubt the US govt cares about DDG.

Also, the US/UK gov is not an entirely unreasonable starting point for a list. There are also lots of academic researchers, media, etc. Better to apply some standards than none at all. I'm sure whatever list they have is not perfect, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't have one.

... are you saying Russian disinformation does not have obvious indicators of SEO manipulation? That would be a pretty big change for them.

Yes

... Unless your "indicator" is "deviates from the Washington narrative", which is totally ridiculous.

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/articles/analysis/disinformation-o...

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