[PLUG-TALK] Web search engines focus of right-wing conspiracy theorists

Rich Shepard rshepard at appl-ecosys.com
Wed Feb 23 14:34:56 UTC 2022


The NYT headline is: "Fed Up With Google, Conspiracy Theorists Turn to
DuckDuckGo". The story is here:
<https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/23/technology/duckduckgo-conspiracy-theories.html>

If you can't read it online, read it here.

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On an episode of Joe Rogan’s popular podcast last year, he turned to a topic
that has gripped right-wing communities and other Americans who feel
skeptical about the pandemic: search engines.

“If I wanted to find specific cases about people who died from
vaccine-related injuries, I had to go to DuckDuckGo,” Mr. Rogan said,
referring to the small privacy-focused search engine. “I wasn’t finding them
on Google.”

Praise for DuckDuckGo has become a popular refrain during the pandemic among
right-wing social media influencers and conspiracy theorists who question
Covid-19 vaccines and push discredited coronavirus treatments. Some have
posted screenshots showing that DuckDuckGo appears to surface more links
favorable to their views than Google does.

In addition to Mr. Rogan, who has recently been at the center of an outcry
about misinformation on his podcast, the search engine has received ringing
endorsements from some of the world’s most-downloaded conservative
podcasters, including Ben Shapiro and Dan Bongino.

“Google is actively suppressing search results that don’t acquiesce to
traditional viewpoints of the left,” Mr. Shapiro claimed last March. “I
recommend you install DuckDuckGo on your computer, rather than Google, to
combat all this.”

The endorsements underscore how right-wing Americans and conspiracy
theorists are shifting their online activity in response to greater
moderation from tech giants like Google. They have increasingly embraced
fledgling and sometimes fringe platforms like the chat app Telegram, the
video streamer Rumble and even search engines like DuckDuckGo, seeking
conditions that seem more favorable to their conspiracy theories and
falsehoods.

That attention has put search engines in a difficult position, fielding
queries from a growing set of Americans who seem increasingly gripped by
conspiracy theories. They must now try to deliver relevant results for
obscure search terms and avoid surfacing possible misinformation, all while
steering clear of censorship claims.

DuckDuckGo, which has about 3 percent of the United States search market,
holds little direct control over the links in its search results because
they are generated by the search engine algorithm provided by Bing, which
Microsoft owns. And all search engine algorithms are considered black boxes
because the companies that create them do not completely disclose what
informs their decisions.

In a statement, DuckDuckGo said it condemned “acts of disinformation” and
said the company’s internal surveys showed that its users had a wide mix of
political orientations. The company said it was also studying ways to limit
the spread of false and misleading information.

For a glimpse at what conspiracy theorists encounter when they search
online, The New York Times reviewed the top 20 search results on Google,
Bing and DuckDuckGo for more than 30 conspiracy theories and right-wing
topics. Search results can change over time and vary among users, but the
comparisons provide a snapshot of what a single user might have seen on a
typical day in mid-February.

For many terms, Bing and DuckDuckGo surfaced more untrustworthy websites
than Google did, when results were compared with website ratings from the
Global Disinformation Index, NewsGuard and research published in the journal
Science. (While DuckDuckGo relies on Bing’s algorithm, their search results
can differ.)

Search results on Google also included some untrustworthy websites, but they
tended to be less common and lower on the search page.

The Times then reviewed a selection of those terms to check whether the
content on the linked pages advanced the conspiracy theory or not. Those
comparisons often showed even sharper differences between Google and its
competitors.

Those findings matched results from two recent studies, which concluded that
Bing’s algorithm surfaced content more supportive of conspiracy theories
than Google did.

Differences among search engines in The Times’s analysis were clearest when
the terms were specific. For instance, searching for “Satanist Democrats,” a
theory that Democrats worship Satan or perform satanic rituals, surfaced
several links advancing the conspiracy theory. But searching for more
established claims, like the “QAnon” movement or terms unrelated to
conspiracies, surfaced more trustworthy results from all search engines.

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Rich



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