> They should down-rank their trusted sources when their trusted sources publish disinformation.
If search engines thought that their trusted sources were publishing disinformation, they wouldn't be trusted sources.
You just disagree with their decisions about what is trustworthy, that's all. There's nothing deeper going on, it's not surprising that a search engine trusts a source that it trusts.
No, I'm commenting on the fact that search engines do block propaganda sources in the US when they think they're a significant source of harmful propaganda, but very obviously they don't block propaganda sources that they don't think are propaganda.
Your problem is that these engines disagree with you about what is and isn't a harmful propaganda source. That's a reasonable disagreement to have. But you're trying to phrase this like it's some kind of deliberate action or general policy on their part, and it just doesn't make any sense. They do block American sites when they think those sites are significant sources of misinformation. And for extremely obvious reasons that should not be confusing or surprising to anyone, they don't block sites for violating policies that they don't think the sites have violated, because that would be an absurd system for moderating content.
It's like asking, "why won't the police officers arrest all of the guilty people that they think are innocent?" Because they think they're innocent.
> The solution is give those users options for unfiltered results
Important to remember at this point in the conversation, DuckDuckGo didn't say that they were going to filter these results (although I also wouldn't really have a problem with that), they announced that they were going to downrank some of the sites.
Safe search toggles turn off actual content removal, which kind of makes sense -- there's a list of "mature" sites that are included in the list of possible search results or excluded. But ranking is different, turning off a site ranking doesn't make any sense in the context of a search engine. You want a toggle to make results no longer be a list?
Everything on DDG is ranked, everything is. There aren't separate categories of ranked and unranked content, there's no set of websites where DuckDuckGo isn't ranking them alongside other websites. It doesn't make any sense to say that DuckDuckGo shouldn't rank political content or news sites when returning them in searches, I don't know from a UI perspective what that would even look like.
I guess completely randomly sorting the search results for those queries? But... I mean, no one would want that feature, you would never be able to find relevant information for a political query.
Even before DuckDuckGo made this announcement and even before the war in Ukraine started, DuckDuckGo was always ranking these sites. There was never a period of time where these sites weren't being ranked higher or lower on search pages than other sites, and that ranking was always being determined in part by DuckDuckGo's internal bias about how rankings should work and what was and wasn't a "relevant" or accurate news source. From day one, from the start of the search engine, they were always ranking political content.
If search engines thought that their trusted sources were publishing disinformation, they wouldn't be trusted sources.
You just disagree with their decisions about what is trustworthy, that's all. There's nothing deeper going on, it's not surprising that a search engine trusts a source that it trusts.