A neutral web browser is not one that only lets me access politically neutral websites (all five of them), but one that doesn't care what I look at.
In fact, the few times that I've used Yandex were because it is not politically neutral. I was curious whether the results for some queries look different when they're not being filtered through the lens of the American empire. That use case should make Yandex more relevant these days, not less.
(Although, to be honest, the search results were quite boring and normal.)
It's the Russian-language news service that was crippled. First, they were forced to only use officially licensed media sources, then they were forced to add lots of junk “newspapers” chain-posting the propaganda, and so on, and so on. So the headlines on top of the search page have been total crap for years.
The search results are mostly affected by the usual blacklists: DMCA notices for pirate sites, right-to-be-forgotten requests, government blocked pages (supposedly based on client location). Note that this list is not complete. For example, western services silently ban sites presumably “used to share child porn, based on informed opinion” of this or that group that might not even have a legal right to force anyone to do anything. How informed is that opinion? If you look at what Russian censorship agency does in the same regard, you can only call them utterly mad. You can be sure it's not the only case when someone has a backdoor that lets them hide stuff “for the public good”. Remember those stories about third world grunts cleaning Facebook from “NSFW content”, and making first world users feel comfy there? The results of their work are probably shared between corporations, too, and applied in some way.
Virtually nothing in "user land" is politically neutral but I would think/hope that the underlying technology and protocols have a large degree of neutrality.
Case in point, I'd see something like AWS as a neutral utility, kind of like electricity. You can do lots of bad stuff with electricity but your electricity provider doesn't care.
That idea of separation of concerns is now completely broken down, the entire stack, top to bottom, is political.
We used to be able to say AP, Reuters, NYTimes aren't partisan, and we used to be able to joke about RU news being Pravda-style propaganda. Unfortunately, we can no longer really mock the Russians this way with a straight face, as we have now started to look more like Soviet Russia.
Please. Let me know when people start getting sent to gulags - or simply killed - for publicly rejecting the official (single) party line of the United States. The false equivalence is getting out of control.
> Police chief: “Last night we began to take additional actions towards implementing our operation. We moved officers and equipment into key positions throughout the city and took up 100 checkpoints around the downtown core. We began making arrests of key individuals who were responsible for organizing these unlawful activities. (flash) As of 3pm today we’ve arrested 70 people. They’ve been charged with multiple various offenses including mischief.”
Here is a story about accounts of protestors being frozen, preventing them from paying bail to get out of jail.
> But for one protest organizer who was arrested last week, the effect was more immediate. The organizer, Tamara Lich, said she had been frozen out of all of her accounts and could come up with only 5,000 Canadian dollars for bail.
> We used to be able to say AP, Reuters, NYTimes aren't partisan, and we used to be able to joke about RU news being Pravda-style propaganda.
Who is this "we"? I'm Canadian now, but understanding media bias was something I was taught in American public school, with example from historical American media, and discussions on how bias can be engineered by selective reporting, etc.
> Unfortunately, we can no longer really mock the Russians this way with a straight face, as we have now started to look more like Soviet Russia.
Please feel free to inform the appropriate western authorities that I am guilty of visiting the RT website just now. I'll await the consequences.
