Should Microsoft be responsible for DuckDuckGo’s ‘censorship’ of Russian search results?

We recently noticed that DuckDuckGo, a purportedly privacy-focused search engine, has decided to downgrade sites that publish Russian state-sponsored propaganda and disinformation. At the time, CEO Gabriel Weinberg said the move was because the company was “disgusted by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and continued to create a huge humanitarian crisis”…but it may not be the whole story.

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DuckDuckGo’s announcement has caused jitters on both the left and right sides of the political spectrum, but it seems that claims of anger and censorship may be misplaced. In fact, Microsoft is to blame. Maybe the EU too.

In a New York Times article, Stuart A Thompson noted. “DuckDuckGo has little control over its search results, as they are provided by Microsoft’s Bing, which did announce a change in approach last month because of the situation in Ukraine, followed by Bing announcing that it would follow EU orders to limit access to Russia Access by national news agencies RT and Sputnik. So DuckDuckGo is inevitable.”

Microsoft said at the time:

“We are moving quickly to introduce new measures to reduce the exposure of Russian state propaganda, as well as to ensure that our own platforms do not inadvertently fund these actions. In light of recent EU decisions, Microsoft Start platforms, including MSN.com ) will not display any state-sponsored RT and Sputnik content.

We are removing the RT News app from our Windows App Store and further downgrading the search results for these sites on Bing so that it only works when the user explicitly intends to navigate Links back to RT and Sputnik when visiting these pages. Finally, we will ban all advertising from RT and Sputnik in our ad network and will not serve any ads from our ad network on these sites.”

In response to criticism of DuckDuckGo, Kamyl Bazbaz, the company’s vice president of communications, said the sites engaged in “aggressive disinformation campaigns” and were therefore seen as low-quality sites. Such sites are already penalized by search algorithms.

That doesn’t mean they’re censoring, it’s just a weighting adjustment in search rankings, he added.

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