"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.
>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.
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.