So I saw a great chart in a diary sometime earlier this week on the number of coronavirus deaths vs. Iraq, Afthanistan, 9/11 and other significant events in our history (and if anyone can point me to the link, I’d appreciate it). Unfortunately, I didn’t bookmark it so I started searching for it on DuckDuckgo. And that’s when I noticed there was something vawy vawy different about the search results.
Instead of most of the images coming from reliable sources, most were from sites I’d never heard of before. Several were from “freedomfightersofAmerica”, as well as from “veterans today”, “pomo.se”, cns “news”, “newstarget” and “globalresearch.ca”. One was even from a site that had a country code of “.cc”. That turns out to be the Cocos Islands, an Australian territory just over 5 square miles in size with all of 600 inhabitants. So how did these groups get so high up in the search results and who are they?
Well, they have one thing in common — Wikipedia lists most of them as conspiracy theory, white supremacist or actual Kremlin-affiliated websites.
But what was most interesting was when I tried to filter out these propaganda sites.
Notice the “images blocked by safe search”? For comparison, even searching for “adult entertainment” brings up pages full of images (thankfully, safe images for those of us who have safe searches set to moderate).
Since I’m not a programmer, I don’t know if these results are from groups somehow “google-bombing” DuckDuckGo from the outside, or if they’re from programmers inside the company who are manipulating search results. Has anyone else noticed this?
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