Technology/psychology expert Robert Epstein has done a great service to the nation by exposing the nefarious methods Silicon Valley uses to skew the political information we get online and how it effects voting behavior. The globalists who run the tech world have a post-national view of how America should be run, and they are using their powerful platforms to sway opinion in their direction without detection.
Dr. Epstein (@DrREpstein) discussed the issue on the Tucker Carlson show on Friday, but it was not quite as alarming as his earlier appearance in March where he revealed the frightening extent of Big Tech’s secret powers of persuasion:
DR. ROBERT EPSTEIN: Tucker, I’ve been studying this very carefully now for more than five years with multiple randomized controlled experiments around the world for national elections, and I can tell you that we should be paranoid because what Google and Facebook can do is really mind-boggling.
If, for example, if Mark Zuckerberg on Election Day last year, if he had chosen to press the Enter key in early morning and just sent out a message to Hillary Clinton supporters, only saying go out and vote, a go-out-and-vote reminder, that would have sent her an additional 450,000 voters that day with no one knowing that this had occurred — and that’s just Facebook.
What Google can do is really off the scale: our experiments show that Google can can take a 50/50 split among undecided voters and change it into a 90/10 split with no one knowing that they have been manipulated and without leaving a paper trail for authorities to follow.
Spare audio:
Now back to Friday: as Tucker pointed out, the Democrats are still harping over their overwrought conspiracy theories about Russian meddling in the 2016 election, while a more genuine threat resides in Big Tech’s ability to meddle in secret.
Plus, it’s alarming how some citizens can have their voting decisions swayed by rather small influences piped in from the internet.
TUCKER CARLSON: How about the threat of Facebook itself or other tech giants? Representatives from about a dozen tech companies including Facebook and Twitter held a secret meeting today ostensibly to discuss how to resist the manipulations of these platforms, but could it be that these companies themselves are manipulative? Could they and not the Russians be imperiling our democracy?
Nobody has studied this more carefully than Robert Epstein; he’s the senior research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research, and he joins us tonight. Dr. Epstein, thanks very much for joining us. I just want to say at the outset I have no idea what your politics are; I don’t think you’re a conservative; I don’t think it matters. You care about democracy. Tell us, should we be concerned potentially about the manipulation of our democracy by the tech companies?
DR. ROBERT EPSTEIN: Tucker, it’s great to be back. I am NOT a conservative, and we should be extremely concerned because I can tell you the bottom line here is content no longer matters: all that matters is the filtering and ordering of content and that is completely in the hands of Google and Facebook and to a lesser extent Twitter.
CARLSON: So what would happen — I know that you’ve gamed this out to some large extent — how would a company potentially like Facebook or Google manipulate public opinion to achieve a desired result in an election?
EPSTEIN: Well I think they’re doing this all the time actually, because we’re well aware of the fact that they suppress material, sometimes they announce it, sometimes they don’t. We are aware of the fact that Google puts some items higher in search results than other items; well, if search results favor one candidate that shifts votes. I think we’re well aware of the fact that news feeds on Facebook sometimes seem to favor one political point of view over another, and that shifts votes. So I have an article coming out very soon about ten different ways that these big tech companies can shift millions of votes in November, in fact I calculate this November they’ll be able to shift upwards of 12 million votes just in the midterm elections.
CARLSON: If they have the power to do that and they have a demonstrated political preference and a demonstrated willingness to exercise that preference by suppressing information they disagree with, as we both have seen, then why shouldn’t we be terrified that they’re going to subvert our democracy completely?
EPSTEIN: Well I think democracy has been subverted actually because at the moment you see there are no specific rules or regulations that are stopping these companies from exercising the power that they have; so that’s a problem. Another problem is that we have no monitoring systems in place; at the moment I’m working with academics and with business people to build monitoring systems, but until those systems are fully in place, you can’t even really track what it is they’re doing, what it is they’re showing people. So we’ve got some big problems here at the moment. I think the problems can be solved at some point but at the moment I think democracy is in trouble.
CARLSON: So Republicans don’t want to do anything because they’re free market absolutists under the narcotic sway of libertarian religion, and Democrats don’t to do anything because they know that helps them. But without Congress acting would anybody trust our electoral system as honest and on the up and up?
EPSTEIN: I wouldn’t trust it at the moment because in the research I do, you know I found number one, that it’s very easy to shift a lot of votes without people knowing that they’re being influenced, so that’s a problem, and the other problem is that you can do this without leaving a paper trail. So at the moment, I think we’re really in deep trouble, and I think you hit the nail on the head — the Republicans aren’t doing anything about it, and the Democrats aren’t doing anything about it; each for their own reasons.
CARLSON: It’s terrifying. Thank you, Dr. Epstein, for calling attention to this.
Breitbart News has also been reporting on Epstein’s work examining Big Tech’s surreptitious influence and censorship, e.g. Exclusive — Robert Epstein: Who Gave Private Big Tech Companies the Power to Decide What We Can See? which includes a 36-minute audio interview.
