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Comment by Karunamon

4 years ago

What you have basically done here is say "we only downrank spam" (this is fine), and then said "state-sponsored news is inherently spam" (this is not).

You are using a definition of "spam" that is not commonly held or understood by those who would be your users. Whether or not this is for a noble reason, this renders it a dark pattern. This is not only a violation of the principle of least astonishment, your explanation comes off as deceptive. You are making a value judgment on truth and working that into the product while claiming you are not making a value judgment.

Relevance and truth are two different things. It is not your job to be making calls on the second one, and I find your willful conflation of these concepts, and attempts to deflect from the fact that you have done so to be a bit gross.

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Karunamon

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lioeters  4 years ago

> we rely on multiple non-governmental and non-political organizations that specialize in objectively assessing journalistic standards.

This is a vaguely worded workaround for applying censorship, especially without giving a specific list of organizations that they consult. The use of the term "objective" is very sneaky here, even manipulative. I didn't realize DuckDuckGo did this - how disappointing.

Time to start trying other search engines, perhaps a proxied or self-hosted one like SearXNG as GP suggested.

https://docs.searxng.org/