> Yandex. It reminds me of old Google, returning reasonable results and much less "shaping results to please our corpo-political masters".
As long as you don't search anything related to Russia itself, or to Russian interests elsewhere (like their invasion of Ukraine). Then it's very heavily biased, priority is given to state ran propaganda mills, independent media is hidden from results, etc.
And before anyone starts thinking about whatabouting, Yandex are based in a country where journalists are openly and publicly assasinated to intimadate. It would be delusional to expect any sort of press and related (like search engine or aggregation) freedom, or to try to compare this to anything in any other developed country.
Reminds me of this old joke.
A Soviet citizen and an American are sitting next to each other on a commercial flight.
The American turns to the Russian and says, "I have to hand it to you — your state propaganda is very impressive. You really know how to shape what people think."
The Soviet smiles, nods, and replies, "Thank you, but it's really nothing compared to American propaganda."
The American looks shocked and says, "What are you talking about? We don't have any propaganda in America."
The Soviet smiles again and says, "Exactly"
What I think you're missing on the joke is that free speech in the USA makes it look like there's no propaganda, because of the plurality of opinions, media and propaganda.
And the Soviet has no conception of what that is - in his fantasy the US state, and all the "satellites" are controlled by one single narrative thread like in the USSR.
I think that's the actual punchline: he doesn't know what free speech is, so he thinks he's the one with the insight over the American.
The sad thing is that still echoes today in Russia, they tolerate a corrupt regime and cope saying "the others are also corrupt and filled with propaganda, so this is ok, at least we know, but they don't" not realizing there's no free speech.
Nobody is denying the existence of American propaganda, but it's an absurd false equivalency to pretend it's comparable to Russia - the country where there are multiple Wikipedia articles with lists of murdered journalists and there is a day of remembrance for murdered journalists. The country which sends assassins to kill dissidents abroad. Especially when we have the Mitrokhin archives since the 1990s in which a KGB archivist painstakingly tried to warn us about the firehose of shit method. Do you know the conspiracy theories about AIDS were started by the KGB? This is the kind of shit we're talking about, not Americans jacking themselves off on their anthem thanking troops for their service.
Actually sorry, it's beyond absurd.
> Actually sorry, it's beyond absurd.
So is Fox News. That's the OVERT propaganda.
So, I decided to check, and the first links that show up when I search for "war ukraine" in yandex.com are Google news are from rbc.ua and bbc.com. When I search for it in yandex.com, the first link is CNN, the second google news, the third is indeed TASS, but the fourth is novayagazeta.
I then picked "bucha" as the query most likely the be affected by propaganda and censorship. In yandex.ru, there are propaganda outfits in the result (something called ruwiki.ru comes third), most links are of fairly direct accounts of the massacre by independent media. The AI summary says the town was "occupied" by the Russian army and "liberated" by the Ukrainian one and "После отступления российских войск в городе были обнаружены многочисленные свидетельства массовых убийств мирных жителей." On yandex.com on the other hand, the first page of results does look fairly propagandistic, including "globalresearch.ca" and "donbass-insider.com", which seem like propaganda outfits. But it also does include accounts from novayagazeta, al Jazeera a video of killings from Radio Free Europe.
While they do put either own propaganda, neither Western, nor Ukraininan nor independent media is not hidden from the results and it's not visibly de-prioritized.
Of course, I wouldn't discount the possibility that the results would look quite different from Russian territory. And, if anything, half the reason why Russian propaganda is so effective is that its self-aware and capable of subtlety when needed. "Fuck you if you can't handle the truth, this version of Biden is the best version ever." would never happen there. Unlike Scarborough, Soloviev knows exactly what he is.
Open and constant suppression of information is not the regime's usual strategy in information space (though, they'd ratchet up the level of control when they deem it necessary), which is why I knew the claims here wouldn't stand up to scrutiny.
Yeah, the Bucha search was a perfect nail in the coffin of previously very respected company: https://meduza.io/image/attachments/images/007/699/276/large...
Have your tests been ran on vpn with vpn cloaks?
I explicitly say, that I won't be surprised if the results change from Russian territory. I already put way too much effort to check the validity of an internet comment, but if anyone is interested, they can check.
Any proof of that? I’ve always found Yandex to be substandard but never for reasons of censorship.
there was a source code leak and you can see some examples there which make the president's image more alluring. e.g. if you search for "Putin" they add an invisible "-crab" to your query
that's the most innocent example from the top of my head. There probably are many more serious censorship issues
Yep, plenty, and tbf it's entirely logical. The people working at Yandex do not want find themselves dying of a nerve agent or polonium, which is a real and acute danger for people who displease the ruling regime.
https://hal.science/hal-03217497
https://euvsdisinfo.eu/yandex-from-tech-innovation-to-inform...
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10130930/
https://misinforeview.hks.harvard.edu/article/a-story-of-non...
If it's true just link to a first party example on the yandex site
I wish yandex worked well, but the enshittification wave reached it too. It used to have such a great reverse image search, now it's useless
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What does israel have to do with this?
According to OP
>It would be delusional to expect any sort of press and related (like search engine or aggregation) freedom, or to try to compare this to anything in any other developed country.
Israel is responsible for killing more journalists than any other country. Google has profited by providing services to Israel in the ongoing genocide.
https://cpj.org/special-reports/record-129-press-members-kil...
https://afsc.org/gaza-genocide-companies#Google:~:text=Googl...
I was waiting to see how long it took for someone to "make this about Palestine" - their strategy is to inundate all discussion with the topic.
Over half the journalists in the Gaza Strip are affiliated with Hamas. Many of them infiltrated Israel in 2023, and some of them held Israeli hostages in their homes, including children hostages.
https://www.terrorism-info.org.il/en/abou
So Israel killing "bad journalists" is fine, but Russian are killing only the good ones?
Nice world to live in.
You should know that any country can declare a journalist a foreign spy, a terrorist, but does it give them right to kill?
Without due process, without trial? Because someone says "they are Hamas".
It's Godwin time.
Hamas claims that the journalists are Hamas, not Israel. And I'm not declaring any journalist "good" or "bad". I'm stating that a Hamas member is a valid target. Him moonlighting as a journalist does not change that.
Every claim need to be proven and everyone deserves a process. In a democracy of course, it may be different in a fascist state committing a holocaust.
That's not how things work when you are participating in hostilities in an active war zone. What a ridiculous statement to make.
That site seems completely unbiased and not at all fed by the propaganda coming out of Israel. Thanks for finding such a reliable and trustworthy source.
It only counts when the country is our declared enemy. When our ally does a holocaust, it isn't a holocaust, it's just anti-terrorism operations.
Your Holocaust inversion is not only morally wrong, it is also factually incorrect.
As far as I'm aware, when a country sets out to exterminate* a race, that's a holocaust. Am I wrong?
* Often the torture is the point, and they don't completely eradicate the race because then they wouldn't be able to keep torturing them
Israel never set out to exterminate, Israel set out to get her hostages back - including babies under a year old.
You know who did set out to exterminate? Hamas, who in their very own charter state their intention to eradicate the Jews: https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/hamas.asp
I suggest reading this article which explains the propaganda campaigns that followed the October 7th attacks on Israel: https://www.adl.org/resources/article/hamas-its-own-words
Only one side is calling for genocide, and it is the Arab side - propaganda and disinformation campaigns aside.
Please make the same analysis for Germany in regard to the Gleiwitz radio station
To other readers: Parent is suggesting that the 6000 Gazans who breached the Israeli border on October 7th 2023 and killed 1200 people, mutilated bodies, beheaded humans and dogs alike, raped women, and took over 250 hostages including infants... Parent is suggesting that these people were undercover Israeli agents performing a false flag operation.
you are not sane
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In fact I personally know two women whose babies were burned to death by Gazans on October 7th.
The fact that you people laugh at that solidifies our resolve to protect ourselves from you.
Care to explain?
Parent comment is implying that an ally (Israel) is performing a holocaust. In fact, there have been a good dozen genocides in the past century which I would agree fit the term, but not the conflict that Israel is involved with.
The anti-Israel and anti-US side typically take an argument or incident from Israeli or US history or culture and invert it. A good example is the common Hebrew expression "No other land" - we have culture and songs about that, as well as jokes and it is a common expression in everyday speech. After October 7th, as part of the propaganda campaigns against Israel, that phrase was used as the title of an anti-Israel movie highlighting that another population has "no other land". Inversion of our culture.
Holocaust inversion - accusing Israel of perpetrating a holocaust - is this particular example.
I like your implication in the very first sentence that you think it can't be doing a holocaust because it's an ally. Thanks for proving my point.
No, I clearly state that Israel's actions do not constitute a Holocaust because though that term is ill-defined, every one of the definitions either concludes that Israel is not conducting a Holocaust, or that half a dozen Holocausts happen every decade.
Their profile says they are located in Israel.
I don't understand why they pretend to be an American when they regurgitate Israeli propaganda here.
They probably didn't follow Mosad checklist and forgot to remove their location.
A genocide with an increasing population. And a famine where obesity is rising.
Jew haters on the internet?
Never heard about it.
> And before anyone starts thinking about whatabouting, Yandex are based in a country where journalists are openly and publicly assasinated to intimadate
Thankfully Gary Webb is here with us today to laugh at this