Rob Goodlatte

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Morality is a very interesting subject. It’s extremely subjective, and it’s even more confusing when we make absolute judgement calls based upon our sense of ethics. I want to address one topic about which I don’t see a lot of ethical inquiry happening - our actions on the Web.

Is it morally wrong to spam? Is it morally wrong to game search engines? What about presenting an inauthentic voice as authentic, i.e. astroturfing? Astroturfing seems to be a form of lying, which many belief systems absolutely view to be wrong (10 Commandments, Islamic Al-Baqarah)

At the very least, these actions are harmful to the web – they threaten its utility for short-term gains. I’m not trying to force my view of ethics upon the web - but I think a discussion of morality is a conversation worth having.

SEO Ethics
Last October I wrote an article on “ethical” search engine optimization in which I outlined what I believe to be “right” and “wrong” techniques. Many SEOs laughed at me for introducing morality into what they deem a morally-neutral practice. Depending on your belief system, you might argue that actions on the web are too insignificant to hold any moral weight. I personally disagree with that contention - which was one of my motivations for writing that article. Regardless of whether you agree or disagree about the moral weight of spamming, gaming, and astroturfing, it’s difficult to argue these activities are healthy for the web.

A Good Starting Point
Immanuel Kant put forth a deceptively simple conception of morality called the Categorical Imperative. It’s still an incredibly important concept in philosophy, and it’s a good place to start when framing an argument for ethics on the web:

“Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.”

To paraphrase, to judge a belief to be morally “good” or “bad”, imagine a world in which everybody always acted with that belief. With actions such as murder, it’s abundantly clear that the categorical imperative deems the action “wrong” – nobody wants to live in a world in which everyone is constantly trying to kill one another.

Functional Ethics
Now, it’s arguable that murder and spamming are fundamentally different actions. Perhaps spamming is not morally “wrong” while murder is essentially “wrong”. However, you can adopt the Categorical Imperative as a test for utility instead of morality. In that case, we can say spamming is functionally wrong without assigning a moral weight. It’s pretty clear that if everybody spammed, email would lose all of its utility. If everybody games their rank in Google, Google becomes useless. If everybody creates fake user-generated content, we lose our authentic voice.

Conclusion
I can’t force you to adopt my sense of ethics. Yet regardless of whether these practices are “wrong” - shady SEO, spamming, and astroturfing are unhealthy for the web. I think this is an important issue - ethics is a subject to be discussed openly. Let’s hear some opinions from non-SEO’s on this matter.

 

1. Lee March 16th at 9:06 pm

   Well said. I dropped in from ThemeViewer, and I’m glad I did.

 

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