This is the most ridiculous site in the world. An eviction advocacy group makes a comprehensive site capturing disparate data from all over the country to understand the depths of a problem and the most pressing concern here is tone-policing their copy to ensure some false neutrality toward the "pro-eviction" lobby?
It is about remaining neutral so that people with common interests can collectively work towards a common cause. While the "pro-eviction lobby" is unlikely to be a part of that cause, many landlords could be. From a business perspective, lost tenants represent lost revenues as well as increased risk from new tenants. From a humanitarian perspective, many landlords maintain a good relationship with their tenants and do not want to see them homeless.
An advocacy group that examines an issue from a singular point-of-view risks alienating those facing similar issues yet hold other perspectives, thus shutting down dialogue. It becomes a power struggle, rather than finding solutions through commonalities and balancing conflicting interests. This is not to say that non-confrontational approaches are perfect, but they provide a much more solid foundation for negotiation.
Agreed. There's also the hypothetical case of a potential entrepreneur building this data into content, with the purpose of marketing services towards either party. If things are exaggerated, skewed or misrepresented to rationalize a policy goal, this could potentially have negative impacts on further uses of the data.
However a problem with presented data aggregation, combined with a clear policy objective, is that many will assume the data is cherry-picked to suit the policy objective, and the aggregation is therefore unreliable, low quality data, subject to suspicion.
An analogous situation, politically in the other direction, is occurring with number of COVID-19 deaths reported. Everybody who cares knows it is substantially under-reporting the true number, because it only reports confirmed, tested COVID-19 cases. Yet it is usually presented as "the" number of deaths, and discussed as though that is the factual number.
