DuckDuckGo will modify the engine search to demote Russian propaganda in search results.
It seems that the West has already started the Cold War and that entrepreneurship has no hope on the battlefield. One by one Western companies are moving away or stop their activity from Russia, indifferent to the profit and turnover they lose. In line with this logic, the search engine DuckDuckGo announced that low-ranking websites that spread Russian propaganda and misinformation will be ranked in the Tartars of search results.
The announcement has come from a tweet of DuckDuckGo founder and CEO Gabriel Weinberg. Earlier this month, DuckDuckGo had announced that will terminate its relationship with the Russian state search engine Yandex.
Even if it's for its own idealistic reasons, getting your hands on the search results scale is an uncharacteristic movement for the Pennsylvania-based search firm. And from a company that unlike Google and the major social media platforms, DuckDuckGo has neglected to filter out misleading content on vaccines or on American elections.
After all, in a war there will always be propaganda from both sides. And the Ukraine-Russia war is no exception. Fake news, lies, set photos, etc. all enter the quiver of the two warring parties. The only thing that is unquestionable is the death toll in the civilian population and the number of refugees.
A privacy-minded search engine like DuckDuckGo should make it clear that it does not track its users, nor does it sell data to third parties. The company makes money mainly from affiliate links and untargeted advertising. In fact, DuckDuckGo regularly donates money to digital rights groups such as Electronic Frontier Foundation and in the non-profit newsroom "The Markup".
Mr. Weinberg did not specify in his tweet which Russian propaganda sites DuckDuckGo is targeting or whether the search engine will resort to other types of misinformation, such as climate change or Covid-19.
A number of platforms, including Facebook and Instagram owned by Meta have begun demoting posts from Russian state media. Google has dropped search results from Russian state news agencies since 2017.
