DuckDuckGo has little control over its search results because they are provided by Microsoft's Bing, which announced that it would follow the European Union's order to restrict access to the Russian state news agencies RT and Sputnik.

That means that DuckDuckGo also cannot get access to the fake news which has angered far right site Breitbart which serves as the communications arm of a web of nonprofit and for-profit entities owned or supported by hedge fund billionaire, and Trump supporter Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah.

Breitbart claimed that DuckDuckGo was "adopting the censorship policies" of Big Tech and suggested that its right-wing readers switch to Russian search engine Yandex which can be guaranteed to put Russian propaganda first.

In a statement, Kamyl Bazbaz, the vice president of communications for DuckDuckGo, said that the affected sites were engaged in "active disinformation campaigns," meaning they were similar to other low-quality websites already penalized by search algorithms. "This isn't censorship, it's just search rankings," he said.

The company also announced this month that it would pause its relationship with Yandex, the Russian search engine, which was providing certain links for results in Russia and Turkey.