The DuckDuckGo Users Furious at Its Response to the War in Ukraine
Last week, Gabriel Weinberg announced that his company would be combating Russian disinformation. “Like so many others I am sickened by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the gigantic humanitarian crisis it continues to create,” he wrote on Twitter. “At DuckDuckGo, we’ve been rolling out search updates that down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation.”
Although the move was more or less in line with how other major online platforms have been responding to the Russian invasion, pushback from DuckDuckGo’s user base has been pronounced. More than 30,000 users on Twitter have responded to Weinberg’s post with largely negative comments about the decision, accusing the company of engaging in censorship and injecting bias into search results. Breitbart ran a piece attacking DuckDuckGo as “Diet Google,” and high-profile libertarian YouTubers have also told their followers to stop using it.
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DuckDuckGo’s executives have been trying to quell the unrest. “The whole point of DuckDuckGo is privacy,” Weinberg wrote back to one of his critics. “The whole point of the search engine is to show more relevant content over less relevant content, and that is what we continue to do.” The company also released an official statement, which read in part, “It’s also important to note that down-ranking is different from censorship. We are simply using the fact that that these sites are engaging in active disinformation campaigns as a ranking signal that the content they produce is of lower quality, just like there are signals for spammy sites and other lower-quality content.”
DuckDuckGo didn’t originally set out to be a conservative-friendly “free speech” platform, even though many of its users seem to see it that way. Its core promise to users is that it won’t track searches in order to curate results, a practice that Google relies on. As Google has faced accusations of de-prioritizing conservative content, though, users have also flocked to DuckDuckGo for what they perhaps mistakenly saw as unmoderated search results.
https://slate.com/technology/2022/03/duckduckgo-russian-disinformation-downranking.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
DuckDuckGo seems to be preventing wingers from seeing Russian propaganda, alas.
Not tracking/collecting information is a very liberal concept, going hand in hand with freedom of information ideals. But the Freedumb crowd assumes not tracking searches = the wild, wild west where white men run shooting and raping and lynching to own the libs. 
who promptly quit. Reportedly this week Yandex is looking to sell its media division, Firefox will no longer provide services, and no doubt more to come. 