DuckDuckGo's Down-Ranking of Russian Disinformation Caused by Microsoft's Bing

Slashdot reader nickwinlund77 quotes the New York Times (also quoted here):DuckDuckGo has little control over its search results because they are provided by Microsoft's Bing, which announced that it would follow the European Union's order to restrict access to the Russian state news agencies RT and Sputnik. But the criticism from the far right was directed at DuckDuckGo. The conservative website Breitbart said DuckDuckGo was "adopting the censorship policies" of Big Tech. In social media channels devoted to conspiracy theories, users vowed to switch to alternatives like the Russian search engine Yandex.... In a statement, Kamyl Bazbaz, the vice president of communications for DuckDuckGo, said that the affected sites were engaged in "active disinformation campaigns," meaning they were similar to other low-quality websites already penalized by search algorithms. "This isn't censorship, it's just search rankings," he said.... The company also announced this month that it would pause its relationship with Yandex, the Russian search engine, which was providing certain links for results in Russia and Turkey.

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