DuckDuckGo DESTROYS Brand By Embracing Censorship

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MrGuvernment

MrGuvernment

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DuckDuckGo now deciding to filter content -


Also someone else did some investigation back in 2020 and found some very questionable things:

http://techrights.org/2020/07/02/ddg-privacy-abuser-in-disguise/
here are substantial privacy and civil liberty issues with DuckDuckGo. Here they are spot-lighted:

  • Nefarious History of DDG founder & CEO:
    • DDG’s founder (Gabriel Weinberg) has a history of privacy abuse, starting with his founding of Names DB, a surveillance capitalist service designed to coerce naive users to submit sensitive information about their friends. (2006)
    • Weinberg’s motivation for creating DDG was not actually to “spread privacy”; it was to create something big, something that would compete with big players. As a privacy abuser during the conception of DDG (Names Database), Weinberg sought to become a big-name legacy. Privacy is Weinberg’s means (not ends) in that endeavor. Clearly he doesn’t value privacy – he values perception of privacy.
  • Direct Privacy Abuse:
    • DDG was caught violating its own privacy policy by issuing tracker cookies.
    • DDG’s app sends every URL you visit to DDG servers. (reaction).
    • DDG is currently collecting users’ operating systems and everything they highlight in the search results. (to verify this, simply hit F12 in your browser and select the “network” tab. Do a search with javascript enabled. Highlight some text on the screen. Mouseover the traffic rows and see that your highlighted text, operating system, and other details relating to geolocation are sent to DDG. Then change the query and submit. Notice that the previous query is being transmitted with the new query to link the queries together)
    • DDG is accused of fingerprinting users’ browsers.
    • When clicking an ad on the DDG results page, all data available in your session is sent to the advertiser, which is why the Epic browser project refuses to set DDG as the default browser.
    • DDG blacklisted Framabee, a search engine for the highly respected framasoft.org consortium.
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Unfortunately as it seems to be in most cases big tech competitors posing as saviors are usually frauds or hacks. Either they have bad intentions to start with or are too incompetent to get even the basics right. This seemingly applies to most youtube / twitter alternatives too.
 
DuckDuckGo's brand is privacy, not parroting demonstrably false Russian propaganda. Now, whether or not DDG manages privacy well is another matter, but I don't think they're in the wrong for taking the moral high ground. You can always visit the downranked sites directly if you want to see Putin's lies for yourself.
 
Aurelius said:
DuckDuckGo's brand is privacy, not parroting demonstrably false Russian propaganda. Now, whether or not DDG manages privacy well is another matter, but I don't think they're in the wrong for taking the moral high ground. You can always visit the downranked sites directly if you want to see Putin's lies for yourself.
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Just gonna slip a fcuk putni in here…
 
Randall Stephens said:
Just gonna slip a fcuk putni in here…
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It's the west dude not Russia, we are the bad guys/cause of this mess by how much shady stuff the USA has done in Ukraine.....as for this censorship junk can't have the west hearing info form the other side. The fact a gov can order a these search engines to derate/remove "propaganda" sounds like something the real Nazis did with the radios and shows you how fake our freedom is.

​

 
Aurelius said:
DuckDuckGo's brand is privacy, not parroting demonstrably false Russian propaganda. Now, whether or not DDG manages privacy well is another matter, but I don't think they're in the wrong for taking the moral high ground. You can always visit the downranked sites directly if you want to see Putin's lies for yourself.
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Everything's fun and games until they censor something you don't like.
 
tunatime said:
It's the west dude not Russia, we are the bad guys/cause of this mess by how much shady stuff the USA has done in Ukraine.....as for this censorship junk can't have the west hearing info form the other side. The fact a gov can order a these search engines to derate/remove "propaganda" sounds like something the real Nazis did with the radios and shows you how fake our freedom is.

​

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First: as was mentioned earlier, DDG is beholden to Microsoft's Bing for results, and therefore only has so much control.

Second: "the other side" is explicitly and obviously lying. The Russian government claims this isn't even a war. Why the hell would a search provider want to make it easy to access that misinformation? If you want to cite Russian propaganda outlets like RT and Sputnik to debunk them, you already know how to find them. And it's more than a bit rich to whine about DDG "censorship" of a dictator who has his critics assassinated and imprisoned. You have no idea what real oppression is like if you think DDG is being oppressive; you would soil yourself if you lived in Russia.
 
Aurelius said:
First: as was mentioned earlier, DDG is beholden to Microsoft's Bing for results, and therefore only has so much control.

Second: "the other side" is explicitly and obviously lying. The Russian government claims this isn't even a war. Why the hell would a search provider want to make it easy to access that misinformation? If you want to cite Russian propaganda outlets like RT and Sputnik to debunk them, you already know how to find them. And it's more than a bit rich to whine about DDG "censorship" of a dictator who has his critics assassinated and imprisoned. You have no idea what real oppression is like if you think DDG is being oppressive; you would soil yourself if you lived in Russia.
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We're bombarded by propaganda from all angles all the time. What makes Russia special? I can still find all kinds of lies spread by places like China to my heart's content while they are actively committing genocide against Uyghurs.
 
Meh. Nevermind all the political bs, their curated results were already getting on my nerves just like goog and pretty much every other search engine. When I search for brothers, or boondongles, or putin pie, I want to get results which contain those words. Not 20 other words that are similar sounding or spelled slightly different, minus whatever is offensive or blackballed this week. I want unfiltered results containing what I searched for, even if I have to filter through 200 pages of bs to find it, because sometimes that's what it takes. And I might find some stupid backwater sites while I'm at it, and some crazy cults, but that's fine. I'm not a sponge that turns into whatever I suck up.
 
Armenius said:
We're bombarded by propaganda from all angles all the time. What makes Russia special? I can still find all kinds of lies spread by places like China to my heart's content while they are actively committing genocide against Uyghurs.
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Didn't say falsehoods from China, or Iran, or elsewhere are acceptable, either. But Russia is sending out a flurry of them during the invasion of Ukraine, and it's sending them with the explicit intent of manipulating Westerners. Russian state-backed media like RT and Sputnik is virtually guaranteed to be lying constantly during this period; why pretend they'll have any useful information?
 
Aurelius said:
Didn't say falsehoods from China, or Iran, or elsewhere are acceptable, either. But Russia is sending out a flurry of them during the invasion of Ukraine, and it's sending them with the explicit intent of manipulating Westerners. Russian state-backed media like RT and Sputnik is virtually guaranteed to be lying constantly during this period; why pretend they'll have any useful information?
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We've always been at war with Eastasia.

Anybody who says anything different is virtually guaranteed to be lying.
 
To try to stay on topic: I tried to read through a bunch of links and did not find anything that would compromise DDG. A bunch of random facts put together that don't prove anything.
As for that YT video, it was a waste of time: a bunch of whataboutism with no coherent argument. Just like FOX news!
 
Aurelius said:
DuckDuckGo's brand is privacy
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I must admit I think I was all wrong about this, I thought that it became about getting different search result about politically charged issues and if I read the first message I am not the only one (if they were quite dependant on the actual search engine would be bing and was not even a search engine and just a privacy layer above them which make sense, I was quite wrong, and I am not sure how that plus value notion got to me)
 
Aurelius said:
Russian state-backed media like RT and Sputnik is virtually guaranteed to be lying constantly during this period; why pretend they'll have any useful information?
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Knowing what Russian "believe" and what is push to them is for one at the very least interesting, seeing a completely different representation of even (in the first days I did listen to English RT news a little bit), it makes you question, if and how much sometime we go through something similar.

If for example the way Western measure, is effectly spinned to reinforce nationalism and the party hold (like it often do in China or Russia) it can be useful to know to decide if we support our government and our company to do them or not.
 
LukeTbk said:
Knowing what Russian "believe" and what is push to them is for one at the very least interesting, seeing a completely different representation of even (in the first days I did listen to English RT news a little bit), it makes you question, if and how much sometime we go through something similar.

If for example the way Western measure, is effectly spinned to reinforce nationalism and the party hold (like it often do in China or Russia) it can be useful to know to decide if we support our government and our company to do them or not.
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Oh, there's certainly spin in Western media, but there's definitely a difference between "don't assume everything is true" in the West and "you can safely assume little is true" from state-backed Russian press. That's why I don't mind DDG and Microsoft downranking those particular Russian outlets; this isn't about skewing the narrative, it's about cutting out obvious junk.
 
Aurelius said:
Oh, there's certainly spin in Western media, but there's definitely a difference between "don't assume everything is true" in the West and "you can safely assume little is true" from state-backed Russian press.
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There are no laws preventing the US government from controlling Western media outlets. They can't restrict US media outlets, but that doesn't prevent them from sponsoring and producing content, either.

It's safe to assume most major English-language media is at least partially if not wholly state-sponsored, whether it's the US or another nation, or even nations.

That's why people want as many options as possible, not just stuff coming off an approved list, even if it's entirely legal for a search engine to restrict the content they highlight.
 
tunatime said:
It's the west dude not Russia, we are the bad guys/cause of this mess by how much shady stuff the USA has done in Ukraine.
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It's a little more complicated than that, but we certainly didn't help. For those who don't know what got us to this point, Oliver Stone produced a documentary in 2016 called "Ukraine on Fire" documenting the history of the country the more recent events leading up to the 2014 situation. I would link to it, but it seems to be disappearing right now for some strange reason.
 
Jonnycat99 said:
It's a little more complicated than that, but we certainly didn't help. For those who don't know what got us to this point, Oliver Stone produced a documentary in 2016 called "Ukraine on Fire" documenting the history of the country the more recent events leading up to the 2014 situation. I would link to it, but it seems to be disappearing right now for some strange reason.
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its posted several times in the soapbox thread, where it should be...
 
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