Mmm, I'll agree there is a large fanatic user base of DDG here, but I think in relation to this article, the confusion is more the following:
1. It's an older article, from May, and current search results are inconsistent with what RMS was seeing at the time
2. A lot of users (apparently RMS himself initially) misunderstand/misunderstood that DDG doesn't actually crawl on its own, it relies on Bing results, and by extension, they don't understand that the censorship can be inherited; whether this is censorship on the part of DDG or not I am not willing to comment on.
3. Stallman's solution is a sort of half-solution, as someone else pointed out in the comments, insomuch as certain queries that lack keywords from others may not always be instances of censorship, and that determining this would be really difficult. (the example I'll steal from user tagawa is:
"red ford mustang" and "red ford mustang toy",
"wall street 2015" and "wall street 2015 protest",
"photos of jam" and "photos of jam jars", etc.)
That's not so say the fanbase of DDG has never been rabid, but in this instance, I think the confusion and defense is probably applicable - what we see now with DDG is way different than what Stallman saw.
Echoing other comments, my problem is with the framing of it.
DDG is, as I understand it, basically a light privacy-protecting wrapper around third-party search APIs. So while you may be getting "censored" results, DDG is not an active participant in that "censorship" -- since its job is just to go out and see what another service said and relay it back to you, the responsibility for active censorship rests with that other service.
Whether DDG should try to actively determine when results are censored and correct for it, rather than passively relaying possibly-censored results without further work, is a different question than "is DDG censoring", and trying to sensationalize a story by framing it as the latter when what one really wants is the former is... well, intellectually dishonest.
