Should the first casualty of an information war also be the truth? The Kremlin decided да (Yes). The Western powers have decided to play a similar tune. The very obvious
censorship on social media & less obvious filtering is now increasing on search, as you can see in these images.
What’s your feedback & thoughts for us @mojeek?
I’ll give you my view as this pertains to Mojeek.
Newsfeeds and news search like on the Android app and Mojeek news search. This is where you have the most editorial control since the news sources have been chosen by somebody at Mojeek. On these I would not include known propaganda sources that by definition do not have editorial independence. (ie. RT, maybe even VOA).
Web Search: this gets tricky. Mojeek is a search engine so if I search for “RT” Russia Today then I should at least get the root domain in the serps. If I search for “official russian news” I should get the index pages of the various officially sanctioned russian news sources. The tricky question is: given Mojeek’s limited resources, do you want to use those resources by spidering known propaganda pages deeper in those sites? If you do spider deeper and have the results show in the serps should those results be marked in some ways as being a suspicious source containing propaganda?
I have to admit that my view on certain sources of propaganda has changed in the last week and I’m now very wary of the harm malevolent state-sponsored propaganda can do.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts @Brad. Much to agree with. And yes, the world has shifted in the last two weeks. I would add that words have different meanings to different people and they are themselves a weapon; notably “propaganda”, “official” and “misinformation” in our current world.
As you say editorial independence is a key factor; unfortunately not objective and with various levels of opaqueness. In the UK we have the IPA which helps us. We need to look into equivalent bodies internationally, as we build up the News index beyond what is currently only UK publications.
I think people expect factual information from search engines. And that expectation is a function of the maturity of the market and the cross section of people using search today. The issue of separating propaganda from news is important.
Separately, if Mojeek wants to show support for Ukraine in some way, I welcome that.
I would say we stand for truth, not propaganda/misinformation. Actions mean more than words and symbolism. Some actions are unseen and often better for that. Our team members may have their individual views, some expressed, some not. That is their choice. We neither encourage nor discourage them from expressing them. I share some of mine occasionally, mostly on Twitter.
“Censorship is telling a man he can’t have a steak just because a baby can’t chew it”: people in general need to tune their bullshit detectors a lot better, and trying to do it for them is a fool’s errand.
Agreed and that’s a well chosen quote. Mark Twain too - I learned something, thanks. Welcome to the Mojeek community @ArmourTel
Given the fact that many engines exist, I don’t have a huge problem with one of them making these choices as long as they are extremely transparent about it.
I generally feel that the transparency isn’t high enough in most cases, and that’s what causes me to feel concerned.
Engines are already necessarily biased towards some content more than others. If I start blogging about the invasion of Ukraine, I don’t expect to rank above mainstream news sources covering the same content. Ranking algorithms are literally designed to rank some content above others; there’s going to be some bias, intentional or unintentional, involved.
Search engines have to deal with unwanted results occupying the confusing overlap between SEO spam, shock content, and duplicate content. When this content’s manipulation of ranking algos causes it to rank high, engines have to address it through manual action or algorithm refinement. Choosing to address it through either option, or choosing to leave it there for popular queries after receiving user reports, reflects bias.
Two complementary ways to handle inevitable bias are transparency and options. Engines should be honest about where manual actions took place and why. People should use more than one engine with independent rankings/indexes so that one bias doesn’t reflect their entire view of the Web.
Prior art: Google often says “N results were excluded from this list”, sometimes including a reason (copyright removal requests, results with “very similar content”, etc). When results are filtered due to containing very similar content, users have the option to repeat the search with those results included; the removed results typically are indeed almost identical, typically word-for-word copies.
This is a cherry-picked example because Google doesn’t expose this functionality in other situations, and sometimes doesn’t say why (or even when) results are excluded. I doubt they say so regarding filtering disinformation sources. I just think this is a good starting point.
I’m in general agreement with @Brad’s POV; state-sponsored propaganda of one state invading another shouldn’t dominate results when searching for information about said invasion. Giving the most obvious propaganda equal weight legitimizes it, and by proxy its government’s take.
Sidenote: I think it’s also worth mentioning that in regions with state-controlled media, the price of civil disobedience is…high. Russians face jail time for saying certain things about the war; I don’t know the specifics.
I’d be preaching to the choir if I talked about why this is problematic. My main point is that people like me who aren’t at risk shouldn’t be blaming Yandex employees for not wanting to go to jail. It’s easy and cheap to take the moral high ground without having skin in the game. I can, however, criticize the Russian government for mandating this.
This is also why having alternative search engines with headquarters, employees, and assets located a different jurisdiction is important. Nearly all search traffic in the English-speaking world comes from companies based in the US.
Well, it would seem Mojeek remains neutral and congrats! One of the reasons for moving to Mojeek.
A search engine should not filter such results based on which side of a conflict they support. I see Duck, Google and Bing are filtering based on Western Agenda. Pushing anti-Russian propaganda, being beaten even by Yandex, who in the case seem less bias by providing providing the ‘Russian News’ available as per their location.
The power should remain with the people, Whether I want to see BBC or RT should be a decision I make, nobody should decide for me (like some governments have)
