The Internet

Ethics Dunce And Dead Ethics Alarms Don’t Begin To Describe This Admission By The Duck Duck Go CEO

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

Wow.

What an idiot.

Those who use Duck Duck Go do so (or did so) because the search engine was deemed more trustworthy than Google, the high-tech monster that breaches user privacy regularly and lies about it, as well as plays games with its search algorithms to bolster its ideological agenda, all while actively engaging in censorship with its wholly owned platform, YouTube.

Now Duck Duck Go’s CEO, Gabriel Weinberg, actually boasts about manipulating search results to “highlight” what the company, in its vast and unquestioned wisdom, deems “quality” information, while burying links to what it calls disinformation.

Only dead ethics alarms could explain why he thinks this is a positive revelation. He is admitting that his platform engages in censorship, and does not support free expression, dissenting opinions, or controversial views. As a mass of critical Twitter commenters pointed out, by what divine guidance does he or his underlings know what is “disinformation”? The arrogance is staggering. What does “associated” mean? It is an open ended generality to allow silencing by association. But that’s not all:

  • Weinberg is madly virtue-signaling, presuming that Russia-hate will lead his search engine’s users to applaud a confession that Duck Duck Go will manipulate results when it feels like it, because rigging searches will only hurt “bad people.” I don’t trust Big Tech execs to decide who are bad people; too many of them are bad people. Nobody should.
  • It is more proof (on top of thousands of years of human folly)  that those with power can’t resist abusing that power.
  • His admission of the practice, and the practice itself, is gross incompetence. All Duck Duck Go had going for it was an image of trust. No one can trust a company run by someone who says, openly and without shame, “We manipulate our searches because we know best!” It is signature significance: no ethical executive would approve of  such a policy.

The company’s board should fire Weinberg immediately, and if it doesn’t, its members are as unethical, irresponsible and dim-witted as he is.

Well THAT Unethical Tweet Aged Particularly Poorly…

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Biden’s tweet would have been unconscionable even if it hadn’t quickly turned out that Smollett was a hate-crime faker, a liar, and racial division-mongering fool. Like his former boss Obama, Biden didn’t have the sense to keep his uninformed and biased opinions from interfering with the judicial system, and not to try to exploit alleged crimes, uncertain crimes and uninvestigated events, accounts and rumors to exacerbate suspicion, fear and hate.

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Is This The Most Unethical Job In The World That Isn’t Illegal?

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Carolina Lekker, a Playboy model, says that she charges women up to $2,000 to approach their boyfriends on social media to test how faithful they really are.

She approaches unsuspecting men whose spouses or lovers suspect of being potentially unfaithful using Instagram and other social media platforms. After  enticing exchanges, she invites them to meet with her, and if they do, they are busted. Lekker then keeps the money and exposes their perfidy to their partner. If they resist their charms and prove their faithfulness, she returns the fee to the client.

Nice. (Incidentally, this is similar to the plot of Netflix’s “Clickbait,” on which I still have not managed to arrange the promised Zoom colloquy.) Continue reading →

Still More Ukraine Invasion Ethics Points…Now With “The Trump Connection”!

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

1. How many times do I have to say that Twitter makes you stupid? Here’s a U.S. Senator publicly calling for the assassination of a foreign leader:

It is fine to think this or even to say it in private, as long as you are not Donald Trump and you know whoever you talk to will immediately leak it to the media. However, Executive Order 11905signed on February 18, 1976, by President Gerald Ford, banned political assassination.This EO was reinforced by Jimmy Carter’s Executive Order 12036 in 1978. It is still the law in the United States. Graham is a lawyer, and he knows that as a lawyer, it is an ethics breach to cause a third party to do what the lawyer cannot do himself.

Moreover, if such an act were to take place, Graham’s tweet would be justification for Russia to suspect, or even conclude, that the U.S. government was responsible. A foreign power assassinating or even attempting to assassinate a nation’s leader is an act of war.

2. Where’s Bandy Lee when you need her? It is unethical for a psychiatrist to diagnose anyone with mental illness without examining the patient in person. This is why the American Psychiatric Association’s  Principles of Medical Ethics state that its members should not give a professional opinions about public figures whom they have not examined in person, and from whom they have not obtained consent to discuss their mental health in public statements. Never mind: Bandy Lee of Yale, a Professor of Psychiatry, made a brief career out of breaking the rule regarding President Trump, because hating Trump suspends all ethical obligations and values. MSNBC and CNN flocked to her; eventually, Yale fired her. Now, if it was unethical for a psychiatrist to be diagnosing a political figure as mentally ill from afar, and it is, what is it called when a non-psychiatrist goes on Fox News and claims to be convinces that something has snapped in Vladimir Putin’s head? That what Condoleeza Rice has done twice already. Her opinion on the topic of Putin’s sanity is no more authoritative than that of anyone else who hasn’t spoken to Putin face to face in years. Continue reading →

At Columbia, Free Speech Chilling Takes A Great Leap Forward

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

The assault on free expression as well as the speech-chilling practice of seeking to publicly crush those who do not observe the social justice dictates of progressives in power advanced ominously yesterday. Unsurprisingly, the episode at issue occurred at an Ivy League University, as our educational sectors have been among the trailblazers in speech and idea suppression. Unsurprising to me at least was that it involved Twitter. Just like in the Illya Shapiro controversy at Georgetown Law Center, a scholar didn’t use quite the words he should have (to be safe, and safety is everything these days) according to the Democrats’ Little Red Book. This time, however, the hammer fell harder. Continue reading →

From The Signature Significance Files: “The Divine Miss M” Demonstrates When An Apology Is Too Late And Meaningless

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Another thing everyone should thank Joe Manchin for is the way his decision not to capitulate to pressure on the irresponsible “Build Back Better” bill has caused so many prominent Americans to unmask themselves as the jerks, liars and frauds thet are.

Take Paul Krugman...please! The ultra-biased and partisan Times pundit is supposedly a Nobel Prize-winning economist, yet his attack on Manchin’s “betrayal“—yes, a Democrat voting his conscience rather than meekly submitting to orders is a betrayal—is an embarrassing concoction of appeals to emotion, appeals to authority, and “everybody does it.” A high school paper columnist could have written the screed. “And studies show that policies to mitigate climate change will also yield major health benefits from cleaner air over the next decade,” Krugman writes. Yes, and other studies say they might, and still other studies doubt they can.

This economist also calls the multi-trillion dollar bill “Biden’s moderate spending plan,” though the CBO estimates that enacting this legislation would result in a net increase in the deficit of at least $367 billion over the 2022-2031 period, and that’s with increased taxes. He should be ashamed of himself for abusing his own perceived authority and his readers’ trust with such garbage, but we know my now that he’s shameless.

But my favorite self-indicting jerk is Bette Midler.

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An Ethics Alarms Challenge: How Would You Respond To This?

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

I am a racist

A distinguished lawyer of my acquaintance (though we have not spoken in decades) just posted what follows in a professional forum.

What is it? How did the lawyer come to believe that it should be posted? What would you say in response as a friend? A colleague? A critic?

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Ethics Alarms Factcheck: Facebook Admitted Factchecks Aren’t Factchecks

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Confusion4

Verdict: TRUE!

“Factchecks” became ubiquitous in the media with a vengeance after Donald Trump was elected, though they had been around for a while. This is how Trump ended up with a database of the 30,000 “lies” he had told: a majority of those were defined as such by partisan “factcheck” sites like Snopes, Politifact and The Washington Post’s service headed by poor Glenn Kessler. The exercise was always dishonest and deceptive to the core. I am proud to say that long before Trump was President, during the Bush II administration, I was at a conference that featured the head of FactCheck.org, the best of the factcheckers, but still, as the saying goes, the best of a bad lot, and after her speech I questioned her about a recent verdict by her service that was obviously pure opinion and tainted with progressive bias. She became immediately defensive, and then lapsed into huminahumina double talk. I nailed her, and she knew it.

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Saturday Night Fevered Ethics, 12/4/2021: It Begins With A Hairless Cat…[Updated]

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

1. Where “Ick” and unethical become indistinguishable...Airlines have enough problems without having to deal with…this. A message was sent through the Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System (ACARS) alerting a Delta crew in Atlanta that a passenger in seat 13A was “breastfeeding a cat and will not put cat back in its carrier when [flight attendant] requested.” And she was. Every time the passenger was asked to cease and desist, she attached the cat, which was of the hairless variety, not that it’s relevant, to her nipple again. A flight attendant on board during the incident, wrote on social media,

“This woman had one of those, like, hairless cats swaddled up in a blanket so it looked like a baby,” she said. “Her shirt was up and she was trying to get the cat to latch and she wouldn’t put the cat back in the carrier. And the cat was screaming for its life.”

2. A you have probably heard by now, CNN canned Chris Cuomo. This is a classic example of doing the right thing for the wrong reason: Cuomo should have been fired because he’s a terrible, unethical, none-too-bright journalist. The fact that he also mishandled a conflict of interest, abused his sources and used his position with CNN to assist his brother as The Luv Guv tried to avoid accountability for sexual misconduct all flowed from CC’s incompetence and ethical dunderheadedness. A serious scandal of some kind involving “Fredo” was inevitable.

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Ethics Hero: Twitter

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

twitter4

Ethics Alarms has honored some unlikely people as Ethics Heroes—Bill Clinton, Bill Maher, and Terry McAuliffe, for example. Twitter nabbing the distinction may be a record for cognitive dissonance, though. It is an unethical company, with a platform that does more damage than good. And yet…

Twitter announced that it was expanding its private information policy to forbid posting the ” media of private individuals without the permission of the person(s) depicted.“

Good.

Not that this policy is remotely possible to enforce; it isn’t. “When we are notified by individuals depicted, or by an authorized representative, that they did not consent to having their private image or video shared, we will remove it,” Twitter explains. “This policy is not applicable to media featuring public figures or individuals when media and accompanying tweet text are shared in the public interest or add value to public discourse.”

Yes, the policy goes well beyond any legal restrictions: that’s what makes it ethical rather than compliant. What is ethically admirable about the rule is that it calls attention to an ethical violation so common that few think it is a violation at all. When I allow a friend to take a photo of me, that is consent for that friend to make and have a copy of my likeness. It is not consent for my likeness to be circulated to the world on social media, included in facial recognition databases, be manipulated digitally to embarrass or humiliate me, or any other purpose. No law will help me claim that I did not consent to circulation of my likeness, which is why Naked Teachers have a problem. The law assumes that such use can and should be anticipated when I let myself be photographed. That, however, is a legal fiction. I have seen, online, photos of me when I wasn’t aware that I was in the picture. I hate photos of me.

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