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Comment by chris11 | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

"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?

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.

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"

> 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

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