Performative Conservatives Are Mad That A Search Engine Wants To Downrank Disinformation

DuckDuckGo, of course, is a popular “alternative” search engine, using Microsoft’s Bing as its underlying search engine but then doing a bunch of generally good stuff for the wider internet/public, such as not trying to collect as much information on you as possible for tracking based ads, but focusing instead of intention based ads around your search (like Google did in the early days). I regularly use it and appreciate the more privacy protective approach.

Like lots of internet companies over the last few weeks, apparently DuckDuckGo has been trying to figure out how to deal with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, as well as the concerted effort by certain sources to push a Russia-driven narrative about the invasion. A few days ago, DDG’s founder and CEO Gabriel Weinberg announced on Twitter that the company was rolling out a search update that downranked “sites associated with Russian disinformation.”

Now, there are (of course!) reasonable questions to be asked about what any particular company considers to be “disinformation.” As we’ve spent years detailing, defining disinformation is a lot more difficult than most people think. It’s also prone to abuse by governments looking to censor. And, quite frequently, disinformation flows are really more closely related to the issue of confirmation bias.

Still, the job of a search engine is to rank websites based on what that website thinks will provide the searcher with the most relevant information. It is, inherently, biased. It can’t not be. This is why the entire concept of “search neutrality” is nonsense. A “neutral” search engine is a search engine that just returns random results, rather than useful results. Every search engine is biased, because that bias is what determines what results will be ranked first, second, third, etc.

But… a whole bunch of overly performative Trumpists who must always play the victim, responded to Gabriel’s announcement by falling on their fainting couches to bemoan the fact that a search engine was downranking false information. This includes a Peter Thiel-backed Senate candidate, Blake Masters, who is shocked, shocked, shocked, that a search engine might try to minimize false information:

But there were lots more, and all seemed to be based on the idea that before this, DDG’s results were somehow… pure and untouched by any bias.

There are SO MANY more tweets like this, nearly all of which seem to think that there’s a divine set of search results that are perfect, unbiased, and untouched by human hands, and that somehow DDG’s latest search ranking modification (something every search engine ever has always done as they attempt to continually rank information in a more relevant fashion) is against the norm.

It truly is incredible how little people understand how any of this works.