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?
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).
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.
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, their own interest or political/idealogical/religious beliefs in the future, which in the case of DDG is now a matter of when, because a precedent has been set with this.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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> 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.
Yep, fair point, you're probably right about that. I was thinking more TLDs like .net vs .com and forgot about the regional side of things, even though I had just mentioned it for ranking based on language.
I guess on that note, I also vaguely remember that .com/.net differentiation was something that people tried in various contexts (not sure if searching was one of them) before we all figured out, "wait, this doesn't mean anything about quality other than which one you chose to buy."
> 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.
> 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?
> 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.
> 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.
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> 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?
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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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
It may look like that on a first glance, but assuming even spread of 100M DDG users, those users from Russia, China, India, Indonesia, Middle east may be more sensitive to other kind (in this case western media) of misinformation.
Since this is easily half of the world population I would argue that stance they took could also be easily seen as an 'extremely unreasonable' at the same time.
> 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.
> When we talk about misinformation, it is not misinformation to say that Russia unjustly invaded Ukraine.
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?