Note: This article is not behind the NYT paywall.
Far-right influencers have often encouraged people to use the small privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo instead of Google, saying that the giant search engine censored conservative ideas.
The praise for DuckDuckGo turned to outrage this week, though, after the company said Russian disinformation would be minimized on its site.
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. The hashtag #DuckDuckGone trended across Twitter in the United States by Friday. And on YouTube, users criticized the company for silencing voices.
If you’re using DuckDuckGo, I suggest you stop using it and switch to something else,” said Tarl Warwick, a self-described libertarian YouTube user with nearly half a million followers. He added: “I want tens of thousands of people to stop using it.”
Last month, The New York Times reported that search results on DuckDuckGo and Bing surfaced more untrustworthy websitesthan the same searches using conspiracy theory terms entered in Google.