“This isn’t censorship, it’s just search rankings,” he said. 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. He added: “I want tens of thousands of people to stop using it.” “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. And on YouTube, users criticized the company for silencing voices.

The hashtag #DuckDuckGone trended across Twitter in the United States by Friday.

In social media channels devoted to conspiracy theories, users vowed to switch to alternatives like the Russian search engine Yandex. The conservative website Breitbart said DuckDuckGo was “adopting the censorship policies” of Big Tech. 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.īut the criticism from the far right was directed at DuckDuckGo.

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