Communications of the ACM
Fed Up With Google, Conspiracy Theorists Turn to DuckDuckGo
DuckDuckGo, which has about 3% of the U.S. search market, holds little direct control over the links in its search results because they are generated by the search engine algorithm provided by Bing, which Microsoft owns.
Credit: DuckDuckGo
On an episode of Joe Rogan's popular podcast last year, he turned to a topic that has gripped right-wing communities and other Americans who feel skeptical about the pandemic: search engines.
"If I wanted to find specific cases about people who died from vaccine-related injuries, I had to go to DuckDuckGo," Mr. Rogan said, referring to the small privacy-focused search engine. "I wasn't finding them on Google."
Praise for DuckDuckGo has become a popular refrain during the pandemic among right-wing social media influencers and conspiracy theorists who question Covid-19 vaccines and push discredited coronavirus treatments. Some have posted screenshots showing that DuckDuckGo appears to surface more links favorable to their views than Google does.
From The New York Times
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