For the second Comment of the Day on the controversial assertion that Google helped rig the 2020 election (a “completely baseless” claim, you understand), we turn to Curmie. “What?” you well may say. “Curmie has his own column in Ethics Alarms! What is this, the Curmie Show?” In the absence of what I consider a sufficient number rational, civil and well-articulated opinions on EA from the left side of the political and ideological spectrum, Curmie’s takes, often but not always dissenting from the main post, are not just welcome and appreciated but also treasured. I’m hoping that maybe the angry progressives, proto-trolls and one-note social justice warriors who visit here will read and learn from Curmie’s works. Then they wouldn’t have to get banned and then keep sneaking in quickly-trashed comments arguing that the mainstream media isn’t really biased, just to pick a wild hypothetical out of the air.

Besides, Curmie almost never has a typo…

You can read even more Curmie on his blog, here, where he cross-posts his EA contributions as well as thoughts on non-ethics topics. This is his Comment on the Day on “Observations On The Revived Claim That Google “Steered 6 Million Votes” to Biden in 2020”:

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I find this interesting for a variety of reasons.

First, there’s nothing new here. Epstein’s analysis came in the immediate aftermath of the ‘20 election. Reportage from then is all over (wait for it) Google. So why is it a stand-alone story now? I could understand it as background for a subsequent critique, but that doesn’t seem to be happening, at least not yet.

It’s also purely speculative. We’re not talking about changing people’s votes after the fact, or adding or subtracting votes directly. This is about changing voters’ perception of who is the better candidate prior to their voting, and there is no conceivable way of determining the extent to which Google’s alleged manipulation affected voters’ choices. We can speculate, but it starts getting really mushy when we start suggesting numbers. Of course, virtually every part of society is engulfed in a quantification fetish, so I suppose that part is understandable.

Even assuming the allegations have a foundation, we’re looking at a phenomenon that’s been played out innumerable times by media from every political perspective. The “everybody does it” excuse may be unethical, but the fact remains that yes, everybody does it, which makes this a little less newsworthy. I’ve often referenced the year I spent in England working on my MA. You knew that what you read in the Guardian was filtered through a liberal lens, and what you read in the Telegraph was through a conservative one. But you also knew that both papers maintained integrity. We can’t say the same for any outlet, left or right, in the US in the 2020s.

It’s also true that anecdotal evidence is often misleading. I have no doubt that Jack’s blog posts are “buried” by Google, but there are multiple possible reasons for that, including good old capitalistic amorality: somebody else paid them to move their site higher on the list.

I also tried a little experiment this morning. With Jack’s permission, I have also posted things I wrote for the “Curmie’s Conjectures” series here on my own blog, as well. So I copied the title of one of those essays and plugged it into Google. The post on Ethics Alarms came up #1. The one on Curmudgeon Central, with precisely the same title, didn’t appear at all. That’s hardly evidence that conservative perspectives are being silenced at the expense of liberal ones!

I wouldn’t take on faith an assertion by PJ Media that NBA centers tend to be tall, but Epstein is a far more complicated and therefore interesting individual. His training is in psychology rather than quantitative analysis or marketing. This doesn’t discredit his critique of Google, but if the right is going to grant him omniscience, I await their agreement with him in the area of his actual specialization: for example, his claims that bisexuality is the natural norm for humans and most people claim to be straight due to social pressure rather than their lived experience.

It’s perfectly possible to be really good at one thing and really awful at another. But if Epstein is brilliant, then he’s brilliant; if he’s a wackadoodle, then he’s a wackadoodle. ‘Tis a tangled web out there, whether or not anyone is practicing to deceive. (Apologies to Sir Walter Scott.)