It is a conflation, but I argue that there's no bright line between the two. The ideology behind pagerank is that relevant results are better and that backlink popularity measures relevance. Another sorting objective is that "more engaging results" are better.

Each is ultimately an expression of will, since there is no objective ranking of what makes something relevant or engaging. Everyone will agree on the order of names in a phone book, but nobody will agree on the "relevance" order of search results.

You see this every day in news-adjacent search topics, where popularity, relevance, and factual correctness can all give different "proper" orderings.

Ultimately, people dislike stances that give disagreeable results, but they think benign stances to be invisible. I don't believe a coherent, legal argument can work this way.

I agree with this line of argument in the sense that a choice of loss function is still a choice with implications that one cannot escape. All choices imply the expression of will and the exercise of power.

I think the essential disagreement isn’t so much about the choice of bias as it is about the exercise of power, specifically on who’s behalf do you exercise power? Do you do it for your users or for the greater good? Or for your customers? Or maybe your investors? Or maybe your ideals?