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Or, you know, he had his campaign website built by the lowest bidder, they for whatever reason accidentally included or forgot to remove the noindex tag, and th

Or, you know, he had his campaign website built by the lowest bidder, they for whatever reason accidentally included or forgot to remove the noindex tag, and the candidate wasn't aware of this and genuinely thought he was getting censored by Google. But it's awfully hard to generate outrage on either side of the aisle with such a boring explanation.

hericium 4y ago
Therefore "option two is that the guy who might soon be in charge of Arizona state elections is so incompetent and so stupid that he accidentally blocked Google from searching his website" "Blocked" or "hired people who blocked" is the same thing in relation to a guy who wants to be elected to run things.
- bombcar 4y ago
  If stupidity was a disqualification from political office we’d run out of politicians quite quickly. Google Search Console is pretty good on digging into this, we discovered that a portion of our website was unsearchable because a plug-in was adding a meta tag to those posts.
  - stavros 4y ago
    > If stupidity was a disqualification from political office we’d run out of politicians quite quickly. And that would be bad how?
  - rapind 4y ago
    > If stupidity was a disqualification from political office we’d run out of politicians quite quickly. Nah, we’d have smarter politicians. Maybe with a bit less charisma, but clearing out the blow hards would bring them to the top.
belltaco 4y ago
So the first step would be to ask them why it isn't showing up on Google right?
- bigiain 4y ago
  “Because as we told you when your invoice became overdue, we do not take the noindex tag off until the invoice is paid in full.”
csydas 4y ago
I think the point is less about the technical acumen of a given candidate and what their tech team may or may not have done. It's about that the result of what probably was an innocent mistake is a deep-state conspiracy theory being pushed as a huge censorship narrative. The situation itself seems stupidly simple to me and I would concur the likeliest explanation is someone just made a mistake. But the questions I have are: 1. How did the candidate notice that their site was not being indexed/shown? 2. What did they check once they realized it? Did they ask the team behind the site or anyone how this might happen? 3. If the candidate did, what did the team respond? What investigation was done? 4. What specific elements led to the conclusion of "Deep State Algorithm"? What specifically brought about this as a conclusion to publicly post about? It's possible the candidate was misled and told "everything was fine" from the site side, but I guess for me it's still a huge leap to go from "Everything with the site is fine but it's not showing in searches" to "there is a conspiracy to censor what I am saying". It's not about what technology _might_ exist to accomplish such a thing, it's about what was actually checked and done before this conclusion was reached. That a conspiracy theory was the only promoted conclusion from the candidate is the frustrating part for me, as checking their other tweets and publications, there's no indication anything else was considered. The article itself is being catty and while it's funny to think it's just a case of a politician staging outrage, the core problem I have still exists even if I assume completely benign actors leading up to the tweet.
- chatterhead 4y ago
- stavros 4y ago
  I think your questions assume too much. It seems to me that the candidate saw the website not being in the search results, and either thought "a conspiracy will appeal to my voter base" and spun it as a conspiracy, or is just like his voter base, and "this is a conspiracy by the deep state!" is the only explanation he came up with.
  - JohnFen 4y ago
    It's either the former, or the guy is a complete idiot. A normal person, on discovering this, would have contacted whoever is administering the website and asked them what's going on before simply assuming any particular cause.
sophacles 4y ago
Maybe the contractor did that. It's still quite sad and very telling of a delusional mindset if he didn't first try to find out if his contractor can fix the problem and instead his initial response is full on conspiracy nonsense.
croes 4y ago
>Or, you know, he had his campaign website built by the lowest bidder, they for whatever reason accidentally included or forgot to remove the noindex tag, and the candidate wasn't aware of this and genuinely thought he was getting censored by Google. Well that sounds like option #2 with extra steps.

hericium 4y ago

Therefore "option two is that the guy who might soon be in charge of Arizona state elections is so incompetent and so stupid that he accidentally blocked Google from searching his website" "Blocked" or "hired people who blocked" is the same thing in relation to a guy who wants to be elected to run things.

bombcar 4y ago
If stupidity was a disqualification from political office we’d run out of politicians quite quickly. Google Search Console is pretty good on digging into this, we discovered that a portion of our website was unsearchable because a plug-in was adding a meta tag to those posts.
- stavros 4y ago
  > If stupidity was a disqualification from political office we’d run out of politicians quite quickly. And that would be bad how?
- rapind 4y ago
  > If stupidity was a disqualification from political office we’d run out of politicians quite quickly. Nah, we’d have smarter politicians. Maybe with a bit less charisma, but clearing out the blow hards would bring them to the top.

belltaco 4y ago

So the first step would be to ask them why it isn't showing up on Google right?

bigiain 4y ago
“Because as we told you when your invoice became overdue, we do not take the noindex tag off until the invoice is paid in full.”

csydas 4y ago

I think the point is less about the technical acumen of a given candidate and what their tech team may or may not have done. It's about that the result of what probably was an innocent mistake is a deep-state conspiracy theory being pushed as a huge censorship narrative. The situation itself seems stupidly simple to me and I would concur the likeliest explanation is someone just made a mistake. But the questions I have are: 1. How did the candidate notice that their site was not being indexed/shown? 2. What did they check once they realized it? Did they ask the team behind the site or anyone how this might happen? 3. If the candidate did, what did the team respond? What investigation was done? 4. What specific elements led to the conclusion of "Deep State Algorithm"? What specifically brought about this as a conclusion to publicly post about? It's possible the candidate was misled and told "everything was fine" from the site side, but I guess for me it's still a huge leap to go from "Everything with the site is fine but it's not showing in searches" to "there is a conspiracy to censor what I am saying". It's not about what technology _might_ exist to accomplish such a thing, it's about what was actually checked and done before this conclusion was reached. That a conspiracy theory was the only promoted conclusion from the candidate is the frustrating part for me, as checking their other tweets and publications, there's no indication anything else was considered. The article itself is being catty and while it's funny to think it's just a case of a politician staging outrage, the core problem I have still exists even if I assume completely benign actors leading up to the tweet.

chatterhead 4y ago
stavros 4y ago
I think your questions assume too much. It seems to me that the candidate saw the website not being in the search results, and either thought "a conspiracy will appeal to my voter base" and spun it as a conspiracy, or is just like his voter base, and "this is a conspiracy by the deep state!" is the only explanation he came up with.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  It's either the former, or the guy is a complete idiot. A normal person, on discovering this, would have contacted whoever is administering the website and asked them what's going on before simply assuming any particular cause.

sophacles 4y ago

Maybe the contractor did that. It's still quite sad and very telling of a delusional mindset if he didn't first try to find out if his contractor can fix the problem and instead his initial response is full on conspiracy nonsense.

croes 4y ago

>Or, you know, he had his campaign website built by the lowest bidder, they for whatever reason accidentally included or forgot to remove the noindex tag, and the candidate wasn't aware of this and genuinely thought he was getting censored by Google. Well that sounds like option #2 with extra steps.