Comment by TobyTheDog123
4 years ago
I don't know how you claim that you have not made yourselves the arbiters of truth after posting tweets like https://twitter.com/yegg/status/1501716484761997318
"At DuckDuckGo, we've been rolling out search updates that down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation"
and
"we also often place news modules and information boxes at the top of DuckDuckGo search results (where they are seen and clicked the most) to highlight quality information for rapidly unfolding topics"
Your post here and your tweets tell completely contradictory stories, which only harms your credibility more.
A search engine does have to make a judgement call on what results to rank over other results. However, making that call based on anything but relevancy to the user's query means I'm not going to take your search engine seriously. If anyone but the user is deciding what "russian disinformation" is, you've already lost the game.
Personally, that's fine for me: I don't have to take my search engine seriously to use it, and I dont turn to search engines for my news anymore. In fact, I think the only things I use engines for these days are a replacement for the StackOverflow search bar...
Do you know if DDG also did the same - or perhaps their rankings were already captured by the likes of Reuters et al ("fact checkers") - for the COVID pandemic narrative?
It's quite apparent their desired narrative is falling apart now, where a Pfizer executive publicly admitted they didn't even test for transmissabiity - meanwhile that was arguably the primary promotion point for the mRNA shots propagated by the captured MSM (arguably primarily by big pharma), by politicians (captured heavily by big pharma, enough to be toeing their line); and where Pfizer's CEO at last minute cancelled his in-person testimonial to EU parliament inquiry - arguably because they know they've been caught and will be held accountable by those who aren't toeing their line/profiting from it.
This is the "new" war using "soft" power, a war against all of society that arguably billions of people are now awake to; which speaking of it gets you flagged and lazily downvoted as "conspiracy theorist" to suppress a seemingly endless and growing amount of concrete proof points to support the hypothesis of what's actually going on.
I'm not very inclined to discuss mRNA on a tech forum, but "fact-checkers" do also fall under this kind of umbrella, yeah.
Any large organization presenting what they claim to be the truth is subject to all sorts of unscientific biases, which is why it's so important that people aren't shouted down, that sites aren't de-ranked.
If you let anyone but individual people decide their conclusions, it's a nice, paved, flower-laden walkway to the dystopian corporate hellscape that's bemoaned by the same people who advocate for "fact checkers" and de-ranked search results.
P.S. For those who believe that putting "fact-checkers" in quotes is denying truth, promoting misinformation, etc, etc -- I put it in quotes because even giving them that title gives them more power than they should have.
"P.S. For those who believe that putting "fact-checkers" in quotes is denying truth, promoting misinformation, etc, etc -- I put it in quotes because even giving them that title gives them more power than they should have."
It's part of the same problem of media et al referencing "experts" or "the science" - where the majority of society seems to blindly trust those words or concepts, trusting that the utterers of it are equally trustworthy.
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It almost beggars belief to have to say that of course the vaccine testing is on efficacy of infection prevention, not transmissibility. But wouldn't you know it? The less likely you are to get infected and the faster your body clears the virus, the less the virus is or can be transmitted. Yes, peak viral load for infections that do "breakthrough" may be the same as unvaccinated. That's not a smoking gun.
There is a lot of sinister stuff happening in our world, a lot of coordinated efforts against labor and the working class. Tying that narrative to a conspiracies about COVID vaccines rightly nudges you into conspiracy theorist territory.
And that is the last comment I will ever make about vaccines on this site.
You admit to there being coordinated efforts against labor and the working class - so how do you deal with the cognitive dissonance with 1) the history that the pharmaceutical industry continuously being a very bad actor with the reward of billions in profit, 2) that pharma industry in the U.S. (for example) accounts for something like 80% of the advertising revenue on all mainstream-legacy media channels (capturing the narrative of what news is able to air), and 3) practically all U.S. politicians on both the Republic and Democrat side are given $$ - lobbied by the pharmaceutical industry?
The rest of what you shared seems to be relatively shallow narratives you've been trained/programmed to believe for you to then parrot.
My question above isn't about "vaccines" - so hopefully you're willing to answer and won't avoid the cognitive dissonance you're certain to encounter if you attempt to answer it; or perhaps we'll see what mental gymnastics you need to use to dismiss the multiple very clear conflicts of interest and guaranteed-obvious influence that pharma has on our society via politicians that make policy decisions - and via narratives propagated to the masses via mainstream-legacy media channels.
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> It's quite apparent their desired narrative is falling apart now, where a Pfizer executive publicly admitted they didn't even test for transmissabiity
This was known when the clinical trial docs where first published. No one said it did at the very beginning, it was never hidden by anyone. The data of reducing transmission was collected when the vaccines began to roll out. And for pre-omicron strains it did reduce transmission.
This whole thing about the recent Pfizer thing is just some anti-vaxx narrative.
Yeah, all the conspiratorial anti-vax BS is just sad. There weren't millions of people killed by getting vaccinated, so all that pre-shot BS about the danger of a new vaccine didn't pan out - because they'd been testing it for years, and it wasn't actually dangerous.
There was an update clarifying that tweet.
https://twitter.com/yegg/status/1515637392190935041
The tweet:
"Search ranking and censorship are entirely different things. We make our results useful by ranking spam lower.
We are not ranking based on any political agenda or my (or anyone else's) personal political opinions. We are also not assessing any individual news stories."
Entirely different things? Are we supposed to just swallow that statement and pretend one doesn't cause suppression - even if it isn't 100% suppression like outright censorship is?
And, if it's not political, then why did the down-ranking occur after political incident.. and the rest of the tweet is trying to minimize.
I saw it - it didn't help their case much:
>Search ranking and censorship are entirely different things. We make our results useful by ranking spam lower.
They're only different things if the ranking decision is based on relevance. If you de-rank something based on political agenda, that's censorship. But hey, it looks like they talk about that:
>We are not ranking based on any political agenda or my (or anyone else's) personal political opinions. We are also not assessing any individual news stories.
Why did the initial tweets say the opposite? Are they conflating "russian disinformation" with spam?
Frankly it reads like the PR hit was larger than they expected.