“The whole point of the search engine is to show more relevant content over less relevant content, and that is what we continue to do.” The company also released an official statement, which read in part, “It’s also important to note that down-ranking is different from censorship. “The whole point of DuckDuckGo is privacy,” Weinberg wrote back to one of his critics. Breitbart ran a piece attacking DuckDuckGo as “Diet Google,” and high-profile libertarian YouTubers have also told their followers to stop using it.ĭuckDuckGo’s executives have been trying to quell the unrest. More than 30,000 users on Twitter have responded to Weinberg’s post with largely negative comments about the decision, accusing the company of engaging in censorship and injecting bias into search results. “At DuckDuckGo, we’ve been rolling out search updates that down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation.” Although the move was more or less in line with how other major online platforms have been responding to the Russian invasion, pushback from DuckDuckGo’s user base has been pronounced.

“Like so many others I am sickened by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the gigantic humanitarian crisis it continues to create,” he wrote on Twitter.

Last week, Gabriel Weinberg announced that his company would be combating Russian disinformation. But one move that seems far smaller has prompted a major backlash for DuckDuckGo, the privacy-focused search engine that has become popular on the right as an alternative to Google. In the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, internet platforms have taken all sorts of action, like blocking accounts related to Russian state media or pulling out of the country altogether.

This article is part of the Free Speech Project, a collaboration between Future Tense and the Tech, Law, & Security Program at American University Washington College of Law that examines the ways technology is influencing how we think about speech.

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