By

April 18, 2022

-Western Standard

 

Although social media went wild over a story circulating that DuckDuckGo was set to purge all independent media outlets, the search engine’s owner and CEO took to Twitter to dispel the rumours.

The original story was published by News Punch in March but started to be widely shared on social media sites over the Easter long weekend.

“DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg has announced that the search engine will begin purging all independent media outlets from the platform and will replace them with “trusted” mainstream media outlets instead,” said the article.

It would appear the claims in the story are unfounded, according to Weinberg who took to Twitter on Sunday to dispel the story.

“Hoping to clear up some misconceptions about our private search engine,” said Weinberg in the tweet.

Weinberg said the story was “completely made up” and said his company is “not purging any media outlets from results.”

“Anyone can verify this by searching for an outlet and see it come up in results,” he said.

“Similarly, we are not “purging” YouTube-dl or The Pirate Bay and they both have actually been continuously available in our results if you search for them by name — which most people do. Our site operator — which hardly anyone uses — is having issues which we are looking into.”

Weinberg also debunked the notion the company has been purchased by Google.

“We are not and have never been owned by Google, and we also don’t rely on Google’s results for any of our search results,” said Weinberg.

“We have been an independent company since our founding in 2008.”

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE AND SUBSCRIBE TO THE WESTERN STANDARD