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Comment by lolinder | Hacker News Reader

I get so tired of seeing yegg raked over the coals for this one.

A search engine by definition takes an editorial stance on things. They take in all of the internet and decide what to present to users. For a search engine to take no editorial position is to yield the floor to whoever can best game the system, and a propaganda machine like Russia's is absolutely capable of exploiting a search engine that doesn't proactively take measures to avoid being exploited.

That DDG wanted to avoid spreading Russian propaganda that argues against the very existence of the Ukrainian people isn't DDG meddling in politics, it's them steering clear of enabling genocide.

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it is not a search engine's job to filter their results based on acceptable politics. the only explicit filtering out they should be doing is filtering out manipulation, explicitly illegal content, spam, fraudulent content and stuff like that. aside from that the filtering algorithm should be largely neutral and unbiased. it's not a search engine's job to refuse to answer search results because the owner finds it distasteful.

Does bad-faith propaganda not qualify as fraudulent content?

yes they should obviously be filtering out or downranking manipulated and fraudulent propaganda content. these policies would have existed before the invasion happened so there would be no reason to say that you are going to be downranking russian information unless you are planning on adding additional filtering and manipulation to the ranking on top of what you would normally do to content. they should be filtering all content neutrally and equally, not filtering russian content more because the owner wants to inject politics into their algorithm.

So no more NYT?

How do you think search engines detect manipulation, down, fraudulent content, etc, if not by judging the content? Content is all a search engine sees.

An article about a Nigerian prince who needs money is likely to be a scam. An article about how Ukraine is really just a rebellious Russian province is likely to be state-sponsored propaganda.

>manipulation

This seems to be the case being argued here

>explicitly illegal content

Illegal according to who?

>fraudulent content

Fraudulent according to who?

These things you name are an editorial decision and are not unbiased

> A search engine by definition takes an editorial stance on things.

That editorial stance should be "show the user what they are looking for and want to see". The customer is always right, otherwise the real customer is someone else.

> For a search engine to take no editorial position is to yield the floor to whoever can best game the system

I am not against search engines having heuristics against state-sponsored propaganda, but there is no need for those heuristics to single out a particular state. Russian state-sponsored content shouldn't be treated differently than American, Chinese, Ukrainian, or any other state's propaganda.

> The customer is always right, otherwise the real customer is someone else.

Sometimes a company takes an ethical stance for the sake of being ethical. Shocking, I know, but it occasionally happens.

They could simply add a “propaganda” tag and give an option to filter out the search results marked with that tag. If anything I can specifically search for Russian propaganda, for whatever reason.

Yes, you can, and downranking propaganda wouldn't stop it from turning up if you go looking.

But when my naive sister-in-law hears something about how Ukraine isn't a real country, I don't want the first page of results for "history of Ukraine" to turn up Russian propaganda.

I live in a red state, and there are astonishing numbers of people here who already buy Putin's story. I'm fully behind DDG deciding they didn't want to play a role in spreading his message even further.

> wouldn't stop it from turning up if you go looking.

Yeah, same goes for your naïve sister-in-law. So why don’t they add the “propaganda” tag, so that your relatives could clearly see it and I could search for it (for whatever reason)? They could even add some links to some better sources, as an option. And use some disclaimer when you click on these results, like “Hey, this is a propaganda resource, be careful. Here’s the links where you can read up on the topic if you need unbiased information”. That would probably have at least some educational value, unlike removing and/or downranking the results.

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