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Is duckduckgo.com partially enforcing the "celebrity threesome injunction"?

19 May 2016

The "celebrity threesome injuction" forbids publication in England and Wales of the identities of a famous married couple who reportedly had sex with someone else. In other words, nothing bad, or important.

The couple's identities have been published in articles in the US, in Scotland, and in Ireland, but the UK Supreme Court absurdly continues the injunction anyway.

The reported threesome is so un-scandalous that, on first reading about it, I wasn't curious enough to wonder who they were. However, censorship is a more important issue. Google search has reportedly deleted those articles from searches, censoring the whole world in obedience to the UK injunction.

When I read that about Google, I thought that duckduckgo.com must be better. If duckduckgo does not do business in the UK, it should be able to ignore the injuction, just as it can ignore the censorship orders of countries such as China and Turkey. Then I decided to investigate whether this was true.

When I searched there for "celebrity threesome injunction", only articles without their names appeared in the first few pages of results. Eventually one metioned the name of a newspaper which printed the information. When I specified that in the search, there were still no results that gave the names -- but one item led me to the information.

Only when I searched for "celebrity threesome Elton" did the search results include articles that identified people involved. This proved that the articles do exist, and that duckduckgo does index them. So why didn't they appear in the first search.

Does anyone know how to ask duckduckgo whether it is censoring some search results in response to this injuction?

Addendum (20 May 2016)

Today I tried searches for celebrity threesome injunction and celebrity threesome injunction Elton in quick succession. The latter included an article which named names, that did not appear at all in the former.

Addendum (22 May 2016)

It appears that duckduckgo inherits this censorship from Yahoo. The company might want to take some steps to detect specific examples of search result censoship, such as when items that appear when searching yahoo for A B C D do not appear at all in a search for A B C without D, and fix them.

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