I know a previous topic was locked but hear this out-
Duckduckgo has decided to censor the “Russia misinformation.” But there is more to it then that, the reason theoretically why they chose to do this.
Some of the news media, published a news article saying something like “conservatives flock to duckduckgo” or something like that.
Duckduckgo sees it and they say, we don’t want to be associated with “far-right” platforms like rumble or Gettr. They then downrank the “Russia misinformation” sites to say “Hey, see, we’re not like them, but we’re not as data hungry as Facebook or Google, we fall in the middle.”
There are some workarounds to this.
#1. switch to brave, I mean you can literally look at images and news on it without javascript, and unlike duckduckgo it claims to not store search queries.
#2. On duckduckgo, you can still search for the specific Russian news sites.
#3. Switch to Yandex. Not as private but, hey you can get access to (probably more accurate) Russia news. It is a Russia based search engine.
One thing for sure, everyone starts with no tracking and storing, but the DDG has a lot of analytics turned ON and its app also has a lot of extra tracking. People actually MOD the app to get free of tracking.
DDG Mods are available in many places after tracking is removed.
We already have a good option from searx and mojeek also metager is also good now.
What duckduckgo is doing i don’t think it is bad or good because it is not a single country it is most countries even so called Democratic countries they sponsores news organizations to do propaganda and misinformation just to hide there governments mistakes and scams now misinformation become so sophisticated that you can’t know the difference between both so reader have to be more aware… but a search engine can’t do any censorship without proper research it will be biased in anyway so i think searx is a good way as it actually combined lots of index and show results btw brave search is also good they are in beta seems good.
It seems that now they also “censor” independent media, even if they do not fall under what they would call “Russian propaganda”. As if the non-independent media were not also propaganda x)
In this case the “censorship” is applied by downranking.
They have also censored piracy websites, in some cases, they have been completely de-indexed.
They have even removed youtube-dl ! not even Google does this.
DDG has gone too far, It certainly goes on my blacklist and I will spread the word.
Now what? I’m sorry but Mojeek is very bad. Searx is constantly blocked…
I guess Startpage is an alternative, with javascript enabled and some degree of tracking
And, there’s also Monocles search, thoughts?
“liability for copyright violations might be an issue. The company removed pirate “bangs” (shortcuts for pirate sites) as far back as 2018, and competitors like Google and Microsoft are already downranking piracy-related results. A move like this could protect DuckDuckGo against costly copyright battles.” Engadget is part of the Yahoo family of brands
yt-dl says:
“We would also like to heartily thank our main website hoster Uberspace who is currently being sued in Germany for hosting our essentially business card website and who have already spent thousands of Euros in their legal defense.” https://yt-dl.org/
So yeah, search sites play with results for many reasons, including pay from advertisers, and no doubt letters from attorneys and other MIB. Plz let us know if you find something better, that doesn’t mess up over Tor.
Edit: You did notice the censorship here, above, for “family friendly” purposes. Oh the ironies that could not be discussed openly even here…
I personally don’t quite agree those words are on the same level but I agree I could’ve used better terms so I’ve edited my post. It feels a bit lame you’re calling me out now instead of when that happened (that post is over 2 months old and this is the first time anyone has talked to me about it and I don’t believe anyone ever hit the report button ever), but fine, you could call that a double standard so I have hereby ensured my post no longer can be considered a double standard by any way. In the future, please report problematic posts (and if a mod does it and you feel worried because of that, feel free to ping another mod).
If you say you hate something, is that forbidden hate speech? IANAL, but I hate censorship. I hate having to click “reveal anyway” or “tiny pencil icon” to see what was really said or what was hidden or changed in posts, then try to understand the colour-coded changes. It’s a waste of time. Frankly, I hate most everything about Discourse forum software. I assure you I will most likely NOT be clicking the report (flag) button for anything other than spam posts, which I also hate. I hate when people delete their own posts, and other than spam, those are the only things I’ve ever flagged, iirc. That too was a pointless waste of time AFAIK.
I did not “call out” anything before, because I couldn’t care less about the language used. IMO editing your previous post was unnecessary, and shows you didn’t get my point. My point is: Mod-editing posts in THIS thread, ironically on a censorship topic, was unnecessary and uncalled for.
Regardless, Thank you for doing the Mod job. I would not wish it on my worst enemy, so to speak. I assume all the “staff” do the best job they can. This was intended as constructive criticism, of the obfuscating/censoring of posts in this thread particularly.
