If you think censorship is wrong then it follows that you would think that the Russian state is wrong given that they are going as far as denying this is even a war, and actively censoring those that call it one. Are you saying that you're still keen for them to be allowed to do so?
That’s a complete derailment. This is about the experience that search users should have. If they want to search for “russia official statements ukraine” then they should get results about that.
The fact that Russia has decided to outlaw the truth is completely besides the point.
> The fact that Russia has decided to outlaw the truth is completely besides the point.
It's not when we're talking about whether search results produced by the state which banned telling the truth should be given equal weight to search results by media which is allowed to tell the truth (even though it doesn't always do so) in search rankings
It's not difficult to find official statements from Russia on the Ukraine war including via DDG, without going down the rabbit hole of insisting that if someone searches for "shelling Kyiv" there's no reason why websites pushing the narrative that Kyiv isn't being shelled shouldn't outrank news items of Kyiv being shelled if their SEO is good enough.
Yes, I say let their lies be defeated in the marketplace of free ideas. Basically everyone knows what's going on with Russia at this point. I don't think suddenly censoring their lies now is really gonna change anything.
People keep saying these kinds of things, but Russians had pretty open access to western ideas, news, propaganda, and history, but that didn't stop a huge chunk of them from either tacitly or explicitly approving of this invasion of a sovereign nation. People believe what they want to believe, not what is correct.
People keep saying "sunlight is the best disinfectant" (despite that not even being a reasonable statement in terms of disinfectants) but Russians have had access to "sunlight" for literally decades and this still happened.
It's the same with how people believed we could save china by exporting capitalism, as if that would change things. The fact of the matter is that information, misinformation, and propaganda are game theoretic; a purposely bad actor that isn't ACTIVELY pushed back against will have huge success.
Hell, it even happens here in the states. Both Fox News and MSNBC are perfectly legal to produce and view here, and yet no matter what you say on either station, roughly half of the country will believe it. That's a pretty terrible disinfectant if you ask me.
