The founder and head of DuckDuckGo, Gabriel Weinberg, said that the search engine would lower Russian media and sites that spread “Russian propaganda” in search results.
Some were dissatisfied with this decision of the DuckDuckGo management, which has always focused on privacy and ethics.
On Twitter, Weinberg writes that sites “linked to Russian disinformation” will now be demoted in search results, and the search engine will also display special information fields at the top of the page to help users find accurate and high-quality information “on quick-opening topics”. Interestingly, Weinberg did not specify which sites are in question.
Also, in a recent House hearing, Kathy McInnis, senior manager of public policy at DuckDuckGo, said the company had “paused” its cooperation with the Yandex search engine in the Russian and Turkish markets.
Twitter users accused the head of DuckDuckGo of censorship. They reminded him that the search engine has always pitted itself against Google as a more private and ethical alternative.
To this criticism, Weinberg responded as follows:
Later, Bleeping Computer journalists published the company’s official response to criticism on the pages of the media:
Let me remind you that we also wrote that Scammers spread malware under the mask of the Brave browser, and also that Firefox 100 and Chrome 100 may have user-agent issues.
