flat-earthers would probably also feel they're being unfairly downranked because "the CEO does not like flat-earthers", however. Factual untruth is a good reason for a result to be considered low-relevance to a tangentially related search.
The correct analogy in this case would be if there were both 'square earthers' and 'flat earthers' and DDG decides to penalize only results from 'flat earthers'. Both sides produce factual untruth but only one gets penalized.
I do want to interject here: there is propaganda coming out of all sides during this war, that is unequivocally true. However, it is also unequivocally true that some of the issues/narratives here are not both-sides-are-equally-wrong issues. Russia didn't invade Ukraine to get rid of nazi influence, for example. This is not a territory dispute, it's an unjustified invasion.
I want to be careful while we're talking about misinformation to be clear that there is a difference between wartime propaganda (which is still misinformation) and narratives about why Russia invaded in the first place -- the second category is not a debate where every side is equally guilty of misinformation, Russia is a clear aggressor in this conflict.
That being said, of course Russia and Ukraine are both engaged in propaganda around the current status of their troops, how the war is going, etc...
Who has higher moral ground in a human conflict should be irrelevant from a standpoint of a general purpose web search engine, which DDG used to be.
The moment it starts to openly prefer one kind of misinformation to other, it is basically stopping to be a general purpose web search engine (optimizing for search quality) and starts being a publisher with an agenda (optimizing in this case for a political outcome), becoming a part of the propaganda itself.
Having said that, some DDG users may be fine with this, but many aren't obviously. And I am afraid that those that are fine with it now, are likely to be fine only until the exact same process is used against them or their own interest in the future, which in the case of DDG will happen, because a precedent has been set now.
> The moment it starts to openly prefer one kind of misinformation to other
When we talk about misinformation, it is not misinformation to say that Russia unjustly invaded Ukraine.
I think it's really important to clarify exactly what kind of misinformation we're talking about, because the Ukrainian narrative that Russia invaded for its own personal interests and not because of a territory dispute or to stamp out racism -- that narrative is not just another side of propaganda, it is the correct reading of the situation.
If you're talking about wartime propaganda like how many tanks have been lost, or about staged photos with prisoners, or whatever -- sure, that's propaganda that comes out of both sides. But that Russia invaded a country unjustly and is committing war crimes against it -- that is not propaganda, it's just the truth.
If you're upset that DuckDuckGo isn't treating both Russia/Ukraine's story about the cause of the war equally, then frankly, they shouldn't be treating them equally, because that's not a matter of opinion or something that needs to be tailored to the user -- regardless of who's using the engine and where they're located.
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> Who has higher moral ground in a human conflict should be irrelevant from a standpoint of a general purpose web search engine, which DDG used to be.
There's a weird amount of conflation here between:
- moral judgements
- narrative about facts and conclusions drawn from facts
- factually incorrect claims
People can debate about the first two categories there and how search engines should respond to them, and we don't know exactly which sites DDG is looking at downranking or what their policies are for when they downrank a site. But if they are targeting the last category and if they are targeting outright lies about the cause of a conflict, then that would absolutely be something that's reasonable for a general-purpose search engine to do.
It's hard to debate about which category they're targeting if we don't know what the sites are (that in itself might be a criticism of the policy). But, still very important to understand that those three categories above are not all the same thing and not all of them should be dealt with in the same way.
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