Our rating: Falseīased on our research, we rate FALSE the claim DuckDuckGo’s CEO announced the search engine will “purge” all independent media.

“Unless legally prohibited, you should find all media outlets in our results, and they should generally show on top if you search for them by name or domain name.”ĭuckDuckGo said any user who has a different experience should contact them to investigate the matter.Īfter the claim resurfaced in November, Weinberg denounced it again and referred Twitter users to his thread from earlier in the year.Ĭheck Your Fact and Africa Check also debunked the claim.

“Additionally, impacted sites are not moved so far down in the results that they are effectively removed,” the website says. Those websites are subsequently ranked lower in search results, but they are not removed from the platform. “We are also not assessing any individual news stories.”įact check: Biden's executive order will evaluate concept of a digital currency, not launch itĭuckDuckGo’s website says it relies on assessments from non-governmental and non-political organizations to identify websites that have “extremely low journalistic standards,” as shown through clickbait stories, articles without cited sources and other features. “We are not ranking based on any political agenda or my – or anyone else’s – personal political opinions,” Weinberg wrote. Tweets from both DuckDuckGo’s official account and Weinberg’s personal account in April said the headline was baseless. After that decision, News Punch, a website that frequently publishes misinformation, ran a bogus headline about Weinberg, according to the website Heavy. In the headline, Weinberg is falsely quoted as saying only mainstream news outlets would be featured on the search engine.

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