"Good information" is very subjective. Some people think Fox News information is good, others think it's all lies. Some people think Wikipedia is the closest thing to Word of God that we can get, others think it's a bunch of kids with too much free time on their hands writing about things they have no idea about. Some people think the US government is trustworthy, others think it lied so many times only an idiot can trust it again. Which information is "good"? If a hundred newspapers publish the same article because they are all owned by the same company which told them to - is it "spam"? If a hundred TV anchors all read the same message while pretending it's local news - is it "spam"?
I am not saying there's nothing to be done here - but let's not pretend it's easy and obvious and there's some objective way to see what's "good information" that does not involve a lot of human judgement and a lot of bias that comes with it.
Determining which search results are good to return is the hard part about creating a search engine, and it’s definitely not a problem limited to politically charged content.
Having worked on search engines, I know it only too well. Defining "good result" is a very complex task, that even without politics intruding involves a lot of judgement and very complex and un-obvious choices. Is good result something people would frequently click on? Then clickbait would be the best search results ever - do we really want this? Is it something a lot of people search for? Is it a popular site? Is it a site belonging to a large advertiser?
And when politics comes to it, it becomes a mess. So pretending it's clear and obvious - just remove "bad results" and show "good results" - is really not understanding the problem.
You are listing a bunch of methods that might be useful indicators of "good content", useful for search engine algorithms. But those are merely (possible) symptoms. "Good" is a quality of the content itself, made up of factors such as relevancy, accuracy, completeness, readability etc. Nobody said it was necessarily easy to judge these things, especially at scale. But that doesn't mean that it doesn't exist.
> "Good" is a quality of the content itself, made up of factors such as relevancy, accuracy, completeness, readability etc.
It’s impossible to quantify a rating based on these subjective qualities you listed. I think the point is you can’t remove the human element from ranking search results without leaving the search engine open to exploitation.
"Good information", almost synonymous with "truth", is not subjective. It is objective, observable fact. The fact that is a lot of disagreement, propaganda, and lies concerning that truth does not render it subjective.
Absolutely, but then who is responsible for judging what is true and what is false? And why should I trust those people not only to be correct all the time, but also to never fall victim to their own biases when making these decisions?
The point is that there is no such thing as a perfect arbiter of truth. I may trust a friend with whom I have a close personal relationship to always tell me the truth, but it seems foolish to place that kind of trust in a corporation full of people you don't know.
In the end, we're back to just not filtering information at all, but instead leaving it up to each individual to decide what's true and which isn't. This also clearly has not worked. Maybe this problem is just not solvable.
Back during the first Iraq war (Kuwait) my sociology class did an analysis of all the news to see how they reported it differently. We look at the 6:00 news on ABC, NBC, and CBS and I asked if we could also add CNN because this was when cable was still being adopted. What we learned was back then CNN largely reported the facts/observations with qualified statements and not much commentary at all, and all the other news outlets got the bulk of their facts (except for local news) from the CNN newswires/people on the ground and then fluffed them with their own subjective language. That was when CNN was just Headline News. They've really lost credibility since then. I'm not even sure if Headline News even exists anymore. It used to just be every 30 minutes the news cycled over and over and updated as new info came up.
I see this comment in so many forms across many channels. “Oh no, there is no truth anymore!” (Sorry if I sound a bit pedantic)
But that’s not truth either. While gaining a 20/20 truth picture is hard, it’s not impossible to get a picture that’s accurate enough.
Lots of information can be lock-stepped into a picture that gives enough clarity. A combination of experts, reports and documentation, high quality sources, context awareness, and people I know around the globe gives me a good enough picture.
Also the message that there is no such thing as truth is exactly what disinformation strategists want to amplify.
I feel like good news can distill down to: if there's not enough fact checking in the right domain(s), the editor fucked up. Conspiracy theories, and propaganda obviously fail this test, but do not do so online often enough. Especially not when grifters/propagandists are trying to make money through ads or are state funded by an autocratic government.
Should DDG take into account what is and isn't fact-checked? Absolutely, and if DDG gets better at this, their users will benefit.
You're saying as knowing what the "truth" is is an obvious thing, and anybody could do it, and anybody could recognize whether certain statement is "truth" or not. But it is far from being the case. Many very smart and very honest people routinely disagree on many subjects whether something is truth or not, and on top of that many people also make statements that may look like truth but turn out not to be after detailed and complicated investigation. You can not expect an owner of the search engine to be the arbiter in these disagreements and to perform those investigations. And even if they did, who would ensure they themselves are being objective and not just enacting their own biases and hiding facts that they think are inconvenient to them? How do you observe this fact? The truth may be not subjective, in a pure Platonic sense, but our knowledge about it and our trust in ways how to get to it certainly would be.
"Good information", almost synonymous with "truth", is not subjective.
Truth is "not subjective" in the sense that force of will can't change the answer to even very fraught questions like "what programming paradigm works best in situation X" or "which running back would do best on team X in superbowl Y".
But one's judgement on the truth of complex question depends on one's opinions on the meaning of various terms, reliability of various individuals, the dynamics of human psychology, etc. This overall situation results in people's opinions being hard to compare and "truth is subjective" is often shorthand for this, although it would be nicer to have a different word.
This one is actually easy. Most commonly, orange is a color and a fruit. I'm sure we can all pretty easily list some objective facts about both of those things.
Orange is also the name of a town in some places, and a county in others. But I think you need more search terms in order to disambiguate. The search engine can't read minds, after all.
Maybe the user was actually looking to pay their phone bill? (The first result in DDG is orange.fr, not the color or the fruit)
My point is, there's no objective way to determine what good search results are. There are thousands of different objective measurements which people combine in subjective ways to create a subjective algorithm.
Truth, because different people have different axioms or goals, might be subjective. I don't think this relates to quality of information.
A higher quality information media will give you the tools to get more information, and this is for example where wikipedia shines by requiring citations. Even if some piece of information there is wrong, you usually get the tools to obtain more information, and you get a summary (where they do attempt to stay neutral) of multiple positions when there is no consensus.
Quality of information is not precisely equals to truth, some questions to ask of any information relay:
- Do they give you the sources for their information ?
- Do they make a good faith attempt to stay neutral ?
- If not staying neutral, do they make their position and conflicts of interest clear ?
- Do they provide adequate (non-strawmen) summaries of opposing views ?
- What is their process for correcting information ?
Of course wikipedia isn't perfect, but it is a higher than average quality of information on the internet. You should use wikipedia (or any source really) as an authoritative source (something isn't tree just because it is written their), but it is an excellent starting point. As most other good sources of information are.
You can't easily judge the veracity of any piece of information on any platform, but you can more easily judge a good faith attempt at providing you the tools to obtain further information.
No platform is going to be perfect, but these criteria should help anyone to filter out bad news sources, and it should not be impossible to convince most people that these are good criteria.
When a search provider decides to allow one side of a story to be presented but to remove sites that present the other side, that's pure bias. It may be justifiable bias; that's arguable. But you can't call that unbiased by any sensible definition.
But that's not what DDG is claiming to be doing. They're claiming to remove outright falsehoods, not anything that could be considered favorable to the russian position.
What else can a filter be aside from a bias? Clearly, I'd want a search engine that's biased against spam and generally against "automatically generated" content.
It's hard for people to wrap their heads around how many search judgements are inherently editorial decisions - and how much of this is OK. One factor is that mainstream American news, from Hearst to the NY Times spent a long indoctrinating people on the claim that their position in the political spectrum was "balanced" where everything else was "extreme".
One actually useful thing a search engine could do is allow it's users to see it's biases and even configure their particular preferred filters - within reason. Could be a selling point.
Interestingly, that's what the Brave Search team has proposed. They call it "Goggles". Customizable, plainly visible biases instead of living in a search bubble without even knowing why.
> "unbiased" doesn't mean "unfiltered". For example, I don't want spam or malware in my search results.
That seems like a cop-out to me. They're not filtering "spam or malware", they're filtering "Russian disinformation". What's next? Maybe OAN is "right-wing disinformation" and we should "filter" that too? What about fox news? How far can you use that excuse to say you're not biased?
I mean, do you feel that Fox and OAN deserve the same "reputation score" as Nature? If so, why?
For as much whining here about the importance of free and open discussion, it's unfortunately verboten to say it, but fortunately people will usually bring it up of their own volition. It is like the "why are all the highly educated people so liberal!?!?" thing, deep down you know the answer, and it's not actually "because of liberal indoctrination!", it's that truth itself has a bias, and so "unbiased" results that merely prefer truthiness can have a bias themselves. The fix for that isn't to present both as equally reputable (or worse, for the answer to be "unknowable" simply because "two parties disagree"), it's for the affected party to stop pushing disinformation and falsehoods.
Not all sources are created equal. Not even all news sources are created equal. And if you agree to that, then we agree on the merits, and it's just the outcomes that you disagree with.
(And lest you disagree - Fox News themselves went to court to argue that their programming is not "news media" and is not intended to be a source of truth, in response to slander/libel suits for saying and writing things that are factually untrue to service their political agenda. So even Fox News agrees they should have a lesser "reputation score" than even other news media.)
I think you're under-estimating the quantity of articles Nature and associated journals publish that aren't scientific, or are outright wrong, just because they flatter the preconceptions of their readers. There's even a cute saying in science, "Just because it's published in Nature, doesn't mean it's wrong".
Example: Nature published Flaxman2020, a modelling paper by the epidemiology team at ICL which claimed lockdowns saved 3.1 million lives. People who actually read the article realized that it was a massive exercise in circular logic - the model assumed that any reductions in case numbers could only be due to government intervention. It was then presented as proof to the media that lockdowns saved lives. It had many other problems - in fact the authors themselves in the paper itself that it was illustrative only and that in reality, the effectiveness of NPIs would be lower. The circular nature of the argument was pointed out immediately but Nature only published a response letter 8 months after publication, and never retracted it.
As for your legal point, that doesn't mean much. Lawyers try any argument that might work. Facebook have argued in front of the court that their fact checking isn't actually fact checking at all, that it's in reality merely corporate political opinion, and that no reasonable person could possibly construe otherwise!
>As for your legal point, that doesn't mean much. Lawyers try any argument that might work.
No, I'm not willing to let them off the hook so easily. Why were they in a court of law in the first place? Because they lied to such an extent that it's literally illegal. If this hail-mary legal argument of "no reasonable person would believe us" was the best defence they could come up with, then that is approximately the most powerful indictment of their veracity as is possible to legally establish within our current framework. We should not let them live it down - they cannot have their cake and eat it.
It wasn't illegal, was it? Fox won that court case, because they stated that Tucker Carlson is commentary and not factual news reporting. Which is exactly what his show is, and the judge agreed.
At any rate, do you really think other news companies or talking heads never say things others think are untrue? The reason Fox ended up in a lawsuit is because people on the left are much more determined to take out anyone saying things they don't like than the other way around. It's not because CNN is actually more reliable.
> Just because it's published in Nature, doesn't mean it's wrong
Quoting this without understanding the philosophy of science, in context of discussion rejecting an equivalence between cable television and a peer-reviewed journal, seems like textbook whataboutism.
All published science is wrong to some degree. The point is to be less wrong, in gestalt, as time goes on. We push back the boundaries of ignorance to discover more. TV punditry echo chambers, where they revel in wrongness, are the antithesis of this process.
I understand the philosophy of science just fine. The problem with Nature articles is not that they are mostly right but a little bit wrong around the edges in ways other scientists will soon refine. The problem is they are often no better than science fiction. They are wrong, wrong at their core, the authors and editors know they are wrong and nobody cares because the conclusions are ideologically useful. It's not specific to Nature of course. Science as a whole has a massive problem with such papers. Way too many researchers/academics like to blow this problem off as just the normal scientific process - it's not.
You have rediscovered why it is difficult to make a search engine. This is a problem that applies to all search results, not just politically charged content: human judgement is always required to write a search algorithm.
So where does that leave us? Everything is biased? What does that mean when applied to duckduckgo's tweet from 2019? It's just a hollow slogan? I'm not sure that changes the conclusion much. The first impression I got from reading the comment was that the tweet from 2019 was a hollow PR message that they don't stand behind.
> So where does that leave us? Everything is biased?
Yes, humans have biases. There's not a way around it.
> What does that mean when applied to duckduckgo's tweet from 2019?
Yes, that tweet is obviously a vague marketing message, but if you read the entire quote in context, it was in reference to filter-bubble biases. It wasn't a claim that DDG employees are somehow superhuman creatures immune to human biases. Obviously that's a ridiculous interpretation.
> So where does that leave us? Everything is biased?
Search results are created by humans and intended to be consumed by humans, so yes. (And just to head it off, a web crawler is ultimately just an abstraction for the humans who will later consume the search results, it just happens to have particularly fast and strict browsing habits)
Now that said, accepting that "(un)biased" is an extremely broad term, I'd very easily believe that the intent of the tweet was to point at some specific type of bias that DDG (at the time) intended to avoid.
All search engines are explicitly biased. That is the point, they generate a ranking of results. Heck even how you tokenize text is an explicit bias of what you match against.
There is nothing about this that is close to new. Everyone who runs a real search engine on the public internet has a need to explicitly code in edge-cases from time to time.
If I search cure for cancer the pro bleach crowed will be annoyed that bleach doesn't comes up before chemotherapy. I'm assuming you haven't actually looked at the disinformation that Russian propagandists are putting out. They aren't just saying "Russia is justified in ensuring the independence of areas with people who consider themselves traditionally Soviets" this is "Ukraine is bombing itself to make Russia look bad".
If you're arguing search engines should bias for what you want to see then it shouldn't be ranking russian propaganda highly for western audiences, if you are arguing search engines should bias for facts then by definition it shouldn't be ranking russian propaganda highly.
> Search results should return good information that is relevant to your query
Then they would also filter ukrainian, NATO, EU, US, etc disinformation. Almost all the disinformation that you see on social media ( western ) is ukrainian, NATO, EU, US, etc disinformation since russia has self-isolated itself to some degree and much of russian media/propaganda has been banned.
If DDG said we will down-rank sites associated with Ukranian, NATO, US disinformation, then maybe we could give them a benefit of the doubt.
Not all disinformation is created equal, and that's a critical difference.
The Russian and Ukrainian sides are not moral equals.
If Russia says Ukraine is full of drug addicts, whores and nazis, and that bombing hospitals is necessary to protect itself from Ukraine - that's of course disinformation.
If Ukraine says they have killed 10,000 Russian soldiers, when the real number is closer to 5,000 - that too is disinformation (exaggeration) and I'm not interested in seeing it strictly censored for multiple reasons. 1) It's not a radical exaggeration, such as claiming they've killed 250,000 soldiers or entirely stopped the Russian assault; and 2) it contains quite interesting information: a claim of significant invader deaths (from the supposedly mighty Russian military), which prompts inquiry as to just how bad Russia is fairing. While Ukraine for example has exaggerated their successes, their successes have been remarkable and have shown Russia to be mismanaged, incompetent, weak, and everything else one would expect of a typical authoritarian regime - it looks like a duck, it quacks like a duck, and how wonderful it is a duck. Probably the most remarkable thing about Putin's Russia - considering the kleptocracy - was that it had supposedly managed to maintain a very potent, mostly competent military, which is unusual for such a long authoritarian slog. That turned out to be false, Putin is wildly incompetent as are most authoritarians historically. He's no different than what we've seen in the past with other strong-man dictatorships like Hussein (also a paper tiger military, no coincidence the US chewed through their mediocre Soviet hardware too).
Not all disinformation provides anything valuable to the context as far as anti-fog-of-war information goes. Some disinformation is particularly worthless garbage. Plenty of what Ukraine is revealing does reveal valuable information, whereas very little of what Russia has been saying does the same.
And morally I'm not interested in Russia winning. I'm interested in Russia losing in humiliating fashion, getting isolated, having its economy chopped down by 75%, and in the coming decades seeing the nation split into three or four countries and overall massively weakened to prevent the Russian empire from attempting to emerge again with the next Putin that must inherently follow from their culture of power and conquest lust.
I'm no more interested in leveling the playing field for Russia as I would be for Nazi Germany. They're increasingly similar monsters, and Putin is only likely to get worse as time continues on. The absolute last thing the West should do is treat Ukraine and Russia similarly. We should do whatever it takes to defeat Russia, including winning the propaganda war - the only alternative is to vacate that space to Russia (a neutral outcome in propaganda is next to impossible).
" their successes have been remarkable and have shown Russia to be mismanaged, incompetent, weak, and everything else one would expect of a typical authoritarian regime"
And doesn't make you excited for the war and enthusiastic about joining the fight for Ukraine? Great - but having only information and announcements from one side would give me pause. Somehow the war hasn't ended yet, despite of the zillions of Russian tanks that have been destroyed by now.
"Somehow the war hasn't ended yet, despite of the zillions of Russian tanks that have been destroyed by now."
Well if we're going to be pedantic and childish, then for your information, Russia started the war with 12.3 zillion tanks and the war is still going on because the Russians still have more tanks. The fact that zillions of tanks have been destroyed and that Russia still has plenty more tanks is not somehow a proof that the information about destroyed Russian tanks is false...
True. Many tanks have been destroyed. But the zillion tanks destroyed are often presented without context, and used to imply that resistance has a better prospect than is realistic. The number of remaining enemy tanks (or whatever) is seldom mentioned. Well, I guess that's what the GP was implying.
Every story you read now is propaganda.
West is just better and more experienced in this stuff than Russia.
>I'm interested in Russia losing in humiliating fashion, getting isolated, having its economy chopped down by 75%, and in the coming decades seeing the nation split into three or four countries and overall massively weakened
This scenario includes about 150 millions of people dead/suffering and world economy wrecked. How is this "moral"?
>Every story you read now is propaganda. West is just better and more experienced in this stuff than Russia
You have such a good eye for propaganda! Congrats. Thanks for the education I will make waronfakes.com my homepage. From flipping link to link it looks perfectly fine, covers everything from all parties: Ukraine lying, NATO lying, lies about Russia lying, lies about DNR/LNR. Perfectly balanced
To be fair, they do not claim to cover both sides:
> We are the owners and administrators of several Russian non-political telegram channels.
> We don't do politics. But we consider it important to provide unbiased information about what is happening in Ukraine and on the territories of Donbass, because we see signs of an information war launched against Russia.
Granted, I would have liked to see a "FAKE: US funding biological weapon labs in Ukraine" there too.
Given how hard it is to find out what kind of research happened in Wuhan, despite it was possible to inspect it for as long as needed, I find it hard to believe that one can that quickly and single handedly (esp in the current context) be certain that some biological weapons were actually developed in that lab.
I've also witnessed a lot of biased "journalism" in India to push that unreasonable narrative.
That's more likely propaganda doubled as a humorous reminder of the WMD in 2003, in my opinion.
Which is fine, the authors can believe the Russian government if you want, but declaring the statements of the other side "fake" on only that basis isn't very credible.
All the more important to not rely on mechanism that mirror Putins crackdown on information. The damage from disinformation is just smaller than to openly crack down on content you dislike. Fact checkers don't exist for too long and there are countless issues where they just reiterate the "correct" opinion.
I think there is a lot of projection in your goal here, but that is beside the point.
DDG also already downranks outlets that are not related to Russia.
I agree that the two sides aren't morally equal. However, that doesn't mean that more moral disinformation is less so disinformation, and choosing to let one over the other is being biased.
You could argue however that this a good bias to have, and that's definitely a discussion that deserves to be had and where I'm personally not decided. However, it's good to agree that this is indeed a bias beforehand.
Forget leveling the playing field. Removing western disinformation is still important too. Forget specific positives or disinformation about Russia specifically attacking Ukraine. There’s plenty of other misinformation from western powers relating to Russia. I haven’t seen much chatter at all about the western specifically America’s role in what Russia is today. How often is the IMF and related neoliberal capitalist/imperialist intervention in Russia, starting the second the USSR dissolved, brought up?
This is important stuff to know. I did a few sample searches. The results aren’t wrong. They are incredibly dry. Many being direct studies and long PDFs. People aren’t going to go through that stuff when seeing how Russia is getting rekt or Ukraine is suffering or gas prices are up are consumable via many pics, quick takes, social media takes, and more.
I think it’s important also because of your wording. Russia being the kleptocracy. You didn’t say the west isn’t. It is heavily implied IMO though.
Another unfortunate issue is this all will cloud the west in even more misinformation. The best non dense news knowledge from TV I gained regarding Yemen was from RT. The west is awful at covering the tragedy there. Not to mention complicit too. RT was slanted ofc. Not saying that’s what should be aimed for.
Similarly if Russian economy collapsing by 75% and screwing with the lives of 100M avg Russians as it splits into 3 or 4 is something to aim for. The non mention of NATO being a pointless organization today but especially in a collapsed Russia world would be good to know. That info won’t be given out much I presume. Also to note. No one really suffers remotely like 100M+ Russians if NATO disbanded. Though I’m sure the massive amt of misinformation when the west doesn’t want to keep helping out the millions of Russian refugees in your dreamt future will be absolutely insane. Just like relatively minor amounts of refugees now keep getting called things like the migrant crisis.
Russia should not be hurting and killing Ukrainians. America and others should not be helping Yemen or Palestine or other places have innocents suffering or killed. Most of all, we shouldn’t get ourselves into a state where we keep patting ourselves on the back and pointing to boogeymen to escape culpability. Which is pretty much guaranteed in a future of a collapsed Russia with millions of refugees that NATO will have little interest in helping but will engage in a massive amt of misinformation to escape the very obvious moral failings. At least this is all almost certain to happen based on the present (excluding the help Ukrainian refugees are getting which may be proving the pt more by being such a markedly unique exception) and past.
“ridiculous opinion” is also your opinion. Who said no mainstream media is talking about this?* Who said it should be presented as fact? Even I don’t believe it should be presented as fact. That would be misinformation. Even presenting something I whole heartedly agree with — bigotry is wrong. That’s not fact.
*I was obviously exaggerating with “non mention”. It was also one small part in my thought out, serious and long comment.
However your exaggerations of all caps, “being presented as fact” and “ridiculous opinion” (again which is just your opinion) are all negatives and don’t help any sort of dialogue.
This topic is discussed in the mainstream. Off top of head: BBC, Guardian, Al Jazeera, PBS, NPR, WNYC, WBEZ, WHYY, CBC, The Daily Show, The Young Turks, AJ+, NowThis, Pod Save America, Slate, Vox, Vice all have certainly covered this. Previously, Fox, Tucker Carlson (within Fox and his other affiliations), OAN, NewsMax, Daily Wire, and more on the right have also covered this and before changing their stances because of the public, were very much anti NATO.
I can see how a few listed can be claimed as non mainstream. That’s fair. Though other media listed like Pod Save America and Daily Wire have top 10 most popular podcasts. I think that can count as mainstream.
If publications like WaPo or the biggest podcast, Joe Rogan, have no discussed this yet. They will at some point to some degree.
I’m curious why you thought this fairly basic and quite common rhetoric necessitated an all caps response and hints of insanity that the mainstream cover it. I am respectfully, going with you being in your own bubble and not knowing too much about politics as my hunch and/or enjoying/preferring the status quo. However that’s just a hunch.
The USSR or whatever country rulled by whatever regime, as long as they maintain a large enough army, all while preventing Europe from building its own, is my guess.
You'll have the same challenges as the people who are researching spam or malware. I could see a use-case for a niche product that specifically doesn't filter bad results, but I'm pretty sure DDG wants to be a general-purpose search engine first.
If you search "Ukraine news RT" on DDG you get Ukraine news from RT. It's still there if you look for it. It just isn't near the top of a "Ukraine news" query (I assume you'd find it there eventually if you scroll enough)
Not really, it really is just supporting russia even without any violence. For example in lithuania:
>The decision bans to organize or gather at assemblies “aimed at supporting, in any form or scope, the actions of the Russian Federation and/or the Republic of Belarus, which caused the introduction of the state of emergency” while this state of emergency remains in place.
>The new legislation, which passed parliament with 71 votes in favour out of 117 cast, banned public events in support of "Russia or Belarus actions which led to this state of emergency".
This is what the ukrainian embassy in slovakia claimed. I guess official ukrainian sources have been incredibly unreliable but I haven't seen any fact check on their claims
>Czech law enforcement warns that public approval of Russia's invasion of Ukraine could be classified as a "crime of denial, questioning, approval and justification of GENOCIDE."
There are already the first two cases of detainees incriminated in this paragraph of the Criminal Code.
Shouldn't it be the embassy in the Czech Republic or is it really the Ukraine embassy in Slovakia commenting on Czech law? Not trying to be difficult just generally wondering. Tried looking at the link but twitter wants me to sign up to view it.
Sorry, my mistake! I think it's in the Czech Republic (though I think slovakia did something similar too), I'm only relying on Google translate so I might be very wrong
Search results should return good information that is relevant to your query, and filter out anything that is not that.