Prof. Robert Epstein has warned against Google’s use of its Search function to influence voters [...]]]>
Prof. Robert Epstein has warned against Google’s use of its Search function to influence voters to embrace the liberal side.
Last July, the Senate held a hearing titled Google and Censorship through Search Engines where Dennis Prager testified that Youtube (owned by Google) had restricted access to 56 of PragerU’s 320 five-minute videos that explain history and politics to young people because schools have become so deficient.
Silicon Valley investor and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel has accused Google of improperly working with Red China, including “the seemingly treasonous decision to work with the Chinese military and not with the US military.”
On Wednesday, Tucker Carlson interviewed Floyd Brown, co-author of the new book Big Tech Tyrants.
Brown says he is “terrified” at the unbridled power of Big Tech — as well he should be.
]]>TUCKER CARLSON: So you’d think that we’d have a free press in this country — we’re guaranteed it in the Bill of Rights, but it’s not exactly free anymore. Big tech controls it and the tech companies are doing everything they can to shape the narrative, the storyline around impeachment.
For example, Facebook and YouTube, which control a much larger percentage of digital media than anyone realizes are now censoring, flat out censoring any material that mentions the name of the man believed to be the whistleblower. They’re not letting you know who this guy is.
Floyd Brown is co-author of “Big Tech Tyrants.” And he joins us tonight. So Floyd, it seems to me that we’ve moved to a stage a year out from a Presidential election, where the tech monopolies, which really control all of digital journalism in this country, are deciding what facts we’re allowed to know. Why should we not be terrified?
AUTHOR FLOYD BROWN: We should be terrified, and I am terrified. The truth is, is that over half of all news consumed by Americans is consumed on these social media platforms.
And when they can censor the way they’re censoring right now –both Facebook and Google around the name of this whistleblower — it’s chilling. It’s absolutely chilling.
They have such dominant power. In fact, you know, I know that Fox News isn’t saying the name of the whistleblower, but the name of the whistleblower was accidentally said by somebody on your network, and then that was posted on YouTube, which was immediately censored by Google.
So what you have — I’m the publisher of the Western Journal — we have decided to publish the name of the whistleblower, and we’ve done four stories on the whistleblower, and we have 43 million followers on Facebook. I don’t think ten of them have seen those particular stories.
CARLSON: So I mean, look, there’s a legitimate debate here. Let me just say that no one in Fox has told me what to do or not on that issue despite a lot of reporting to the contrary, I haven’t named the guy because I haven’t confirmed it. I can’t find anybody who will confirm it. But as soon as we do, we will I mean, that’s, you know — that’s journalism, and you may disagree.
But the point is this guy, whether he is the whistleblower or not, is at the center of a really important news story, and the average person ought to be able to make up his or her mind on that, but we’re not allowed to, because the tech monopolists won’t allow us. So why is Congress standing back and not saving us from this? Seriously.
BROWN: Yes, well, it’s amazing to me that a lot of the publications that you know, publish things like the Pentagon Papers, and have, you know, published almost all of what WikiLeaks released, and time and time again, they have been more than willing to publicize things that are the deepest secrets of the U.S. government.
But here this one particular secret, they’re so good at keeping the name of this whistleblower out of the media and you know, there’s been major changes in tech since Donald Trump was elected. And those major changes are all around keeping Donald Trump’s — really his ideas and his message — from reaching people.
CARLSON: Yes, I noticed that.
BROWN: I mean, when you look at Twitter, Twitter suppresses Donald Trump’s own tweets. And, you know, Facebook has limited the amount of people —
CARLSON: So this is much greater interference. I mean, this is an interference on a scale that Putin for all of his determination to hack our democracy never even approached or could have imagined. Purportedly American companies are putting a thumb on the scale of democracy and nobody is saying anything about it, why?
BROWN: They should be and Congress should be investigating them.
These companies have all grown incredibly large. You know, in my book, “Big Tech Tyrants,” I talk about the amount of data that has been collected on individuals. Americans don’t have any idea of the volume of information from medical records to you know, what they Google, to what they’re looking at, every single page of the internet that they visit is recorded somewhere.
And, yet people should be rebelling against that. And frankly, it’s a very dangerous situation.
CARLSON: Well, it is.
BROWN: When you see this kind of censorship, this is worse than what you would imagine from Putin and the Soviets.
Or the Russians.
CARLSON: These people are not your friends.
BROWN: No.
CARLSON: Meanwhile, I think Republicans control the Senate. I think it’s not just Josh Hawley, he is not the only U.S. Senator, where are the rest of them? It would be interesting to know.
BROWN: Well, as you know, as I. . .
CARLSON: I am sorry, but my lecturing is as put us over the edge, this this topic is worth being mad about. Thank you for your book. Thank you for coming on tonight. I appreciate it. I wish we had more time.
A major hint appeared after the 2016 Trump election when Breitbart posted a leaked video from Google headquarters [...]]]>
A major hint appeared after the 2016 Trump election when Breitbart posted a leaked video from Google headquarters showing the leadership’s “dismayed reaction” to the electoral outcome. Multi-billionaire co-founder Sergey Brin compared Trump voters to fascists and said the election “conflicts with many of Google’s values.”
Later we heard more about how Google manipulates search results to favor left-wing results. In fact, Dr. Robert Epstein (a Democrat voter himself) warned that Big Tech can move millions of voters to the left in 2020. During a June discussion with Tucker Carlson, Dr. Epstein remarked, “. . . they can shift upwards of 15 million votes with no one knowing that they’ve been manipulated and without leaving a paper trail for authorities to trace.”
So the leftward opinions of Big Tech can have real world effects.
Tucker Carlson continued his investigation of Big Tech in a Friday discussion with a former employee of Google, probably as a result of a recent Wall Street Journal article, reprinted on MSN.com here: Republican Engineer Fired by Google Claims ‘Bullying’.
]]>TUCKER CARLSON: It’s pretty clear that Google isn’t simply just a business enterprise, though it is the most powerful business in the history of the world. It’s also an ideological organization to its core, who cares what you’re able to see and what you’re able to think and they exercise the same kind of control over their own employees.
Kevin Cernekee would know that firsthand. He spent three years at Google working as an engineer. He says he faced relentless bullying and intimidation from Google for his political views which are not liberal; one manager added him to an internal blacklist until finally, Google fired him last year. Kevin Cernekee joins us tonight.
Kevin, thanks very much for coming on. So, you believe that Google knew what your politics were, that you’re a conservative, harassed you for those views, and then ultimately dismissed you on the basis of them?
KEVIN CERNEKEE: Yes, that’s true. So basically, what happened is, when I joined Google, I saw a lot of employees being mistreated and abused and harassed for sharing conservative views or just for questioning company policies.
And I raised these issues through all the appropriate channels, I raised it through HR, I went to VPs, eventually wound up filing a charge with the Labor Board. And Google knew about this. This opened a Federal investigation from the Labor Board. I was working very closely with an investigator over there.
What happened was Google decided they did not like this investigator, and they made a lot of false accusations against me and they fired me. They said in writing that the reason they fired me was for participating in this labor investigation, and they’re basically daring the government to do anything about it.
CARLSON: I don’t think it’s legal, is it? I mean, you can’t fire someone for initiating a labor action, can you?
CERNEKEE: I wouldn’t think so. I have appealed the decision, and the Labor Board came back and basically said, “Denied.” They did not cite any case law. They didn’t really have a reason for it. It’s basically their will against anybody else’s.
CARLSON: Right. The most powerful country — company . . . country, yes, Freudian slip — in the world. How ideological is the management at Google?
CERNEKEE: It’s highly ideological. You can see bias at every level of the organization. One thing that I’ve noticed is that just handling of routine issues is plagued with bias, like they will get a report, an e-mail from a liberal reporter complaining about something and they will jump on it and they will fix the issue very, very quickly.
And contrast, one thing that I saw when I worked there was, if you do a Google search for “Crippled America,” which is Donald Trump’s book, you would get results that showed Mein Kampf instead of “Crippled America,” and I reported that. I filed a bug against it. I escalated it. I tried to run it up the chain. They took nine months to fix that bug.
They just stalled at every opportunity. They assigned it to people who no longer worked there. They made every excuse in the book to avoid taking down something that made Donald Trump look bad. And I saw a number of other incidents just like that.
CARLSON: Do you believe that Google will attempt to influence the election outcome or will attempt to try to prevent Trump from being reelected?
CERNEKEE: I do believe so. I think that’s a major threat. They have openly stated that they think 2016 was a mistake. They thought Trump should have lost in 2016. They really want Trump to lose in 2020. That’s their agenda.
They have very biased people running every level of company. And they have quite a bit of control over the political process. So, that’s something we should really worry about.
CARLSON: And yet, Congress, including Republicans, are just sitting back and acting like it’s not happening. It’s disgusting. Kevin, thank you for sounding that alarm. I appreciate it. Good to see you.
He was a speaker at the National Conservatism Conference on Sunday and had three questions [...]]]>
He was a speaker at the National Conservatism Conference on Sunday and had three questions for Google:
“Number one, how many foreign intelligence agencies have infiltrated your Manhattan Project for AI?
“Number two, does Google’s senior management consider itself to have been thoroughly infiltrated by Chinese intelligence?
“Number three, is it because they consider themselves to be so thoroughly infiltrated that they have engaged in the seemingly treasonous decision to work with the Chinese military and not with the US military… because they are making the sort of bad, short-term rationalistic [decision] that if the technology doesn’t go out the front door, it gets stolen out the backdoor anyway?”
Tucker Carlson was the keynote speaker at the conference, so it worked out that Thiel appeared on his Monday show to discuss Google’s relationship with China.
Peter Thiel made serious charges against Google during his interview with Tucker Carlson.
Thiel’s charges have gotten the attention of President Trump who said on Tuesday the administration will investigate whether Google operated improperly with Red China.
In fact, Tuesday was not a great day for Google because the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing where Senator Ted Cruz and others grilled spokeman Karan Bhatia over the company’s search bias and censorship. In addition, a panel of critics appeared which included Dr. Robert Epstein who has developed unique techniques to investigate Google’s subtle but powerful election meddling.
Here are the video and transcript from Tucker’s discussion with Peter Thiel:
]]>TUCKER CARLSON: Peter Thiel cofounded Paypal. he was one of the very first investors in Facebook. If anyone knows about the power of big tech and its potential dangers, it’s Peter. So it means something when he warns that Google, the world’s most powerful company, has become a threat to American national security. They may even have even committed treason, he says.
While speaking at the National Conservatism Conference in Washington yesterday, he warned that Google may have been infiltrated by Chinese intelligence and ought to be subject to immediate investigation by the FBI and the CIA. We are happy to have Peter Thiel join us here tonight, Thanks a lot for coming on.
What did you mean when you said that?
PETER THIEL: Well, it was just in the form of a set of questions I asked. Artificial intelligence is something people talk about nonstop in Silicon valley, but they almost never talk about its dual use; if it’s real, if it’s a real thing, it can also be used by the military, it will be will be weaponized in all sorts of ways, and it’s an important national security question as to who has it.
There’s this very peculiar background where google is working with the chinese communist government, and not with the US military so the Project Maven was a decision not to work with A.I., with the U.S. military, but they’re working with the Communist Chinese, and so the question is, what in the world is going on there?
I sort of suggested a few different possibilities. But I think, you know, it’s been described as a Manhattan Project for A.I. So if you go around broadcasting that you’re building a Manhattan Project for A.I., I would think this naturally would draw the attention of foreign intelligence agencies.
I think the Chinese are confident enough, the Ministry of State Security is likely to have infiltrated Google, and I think the Google management has sort of a decision of either letting the software go out the front door, or figuring, it will get stolen anyway and go out the back door.
CARLSON: When you say you believe that Chinese State Security is likely to have infiltrated Google, what does that mean?
THIEL: Well, if you say you’re building a Manhattan Project for A.I., don’t you think that would attract the interest of foreign intelligence agencies?
It’s just hidden in plain sight. And then — well, I think there are sort of all these ways that Chinese nationals are engaged in espionage in the U.S. It’s understandable that China is doing that. They see themselves in a very serious competition with the U.S., but we’re not particularly on our guard about it, and if you have sort of a series of super futuristic tech projects that you’ve broadcast to the whole world, it’s at least a suspicion. And then the weird fact that’s indisputable, is that Google is working with Communist China, but not with the U.S. military on its breakthrough A.I. technology.
CARLSON: Why is that?
THIEL: Well, that’s the question. I think one explanation is they figure they have to, because if they don’t give it to them through the front door, it will get stolen through the back door. So the first answer is they have to.
And then I think of course, there’s probably you know, a broad base of Google employees that are ideologically super left wing, sort of woke, and think that China is better than the U.S. Or that the U.S. is worse than China. It’s always — it’s more anti-American than anything.
CARLSON: Always. But this is, by definition, a threat to American national security, as you point out. So if Sundar Pichai was sitting right here, what would you say to him?
THIEL: Well, I would say answer my three questions. How many foreign intelligence agencies have infiltrated Google? Have the Chinese, in particular, infiltrated? And why are you working with Communist China and not the U.S.? What is the reason you’re doing that?
CARLSON: Why do you think that — the questions you raise, and this is not in any way to minimize their importance — are kind of obvious questions; why hasn’t the US government ascertained the answers?
THIEL: Well, it’s possible that there are people in the U.S. government looking into it and they haven’t told us. But yeah, I think the FBI and the CIA would be the natural places to look into it. The FBI would look at it from the domestic side; the CIA would look at it from the outside and would try to look at seeing if from the outside, their people, you know, controlling people inside Google.
CARLSON: So if someone who’s — this is almost rhetorical — but as someone who’s built a lot of companies, as you have, do you think it would have been possible to create, to incubate and grow a company like Google in China?
THIEL: I think the U.S. is still better at innovation and at starting things, but it certainly can be copied and replicated. And something like this is true of all the breakthrough technologies we have. Most of them are still originating and developing in the West, but they don’t give us much of an advantage if they get transferred in a matter of a few years, if not a matter of months.
Dr. Epstein now believes that left-wing Big Tech can nudge 15 million to the Democrats in 2020 by slanting search results, with nobody aware that it is happening. Yet Republicans are asleep at the switch while Silicon Valley enemies plot GOP doom and the destruction of representative government.
Big Tech’s secret propaganda is a serious threat to our freedoms continuing, but there is little attention from concerned parties. That needs to change.
Spare audio:
]]>TUCKER CARLSON: Back in America, a tech story that might seem insignificant, but is not. In fact, it may determine what happens in the next presidential election; it very well may. A Google whistleblower has come forward to describe his company’s plans to remake the American political landscape. Google, of course, is the most powerful company in the world.
So when an anonymous whistleblower comes forward, in this case, telling Project Veritas that Google is using internal algorithms to shape what Americans see online, and by extension, what they think, you better take it seriously:
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Fairness is a dog whistle, it does not mean what you think that it means and you have to apply doublethink in order to understand what they’re really saying.
What they’re really saying about fairness is that they have to manipulate their search results, so it gives them the political agenda that they want, and so they have to re-bias their algorithms so that they can get their agenda across.
CARLSON: That’s the definition of propaganda, again, being perpetuated by the single most powerful company in the history of the world.
This is not surprising to viewers of this show, James Damore was fired for Google for his political views, his totally conventional, moderate political views and then came on this show to describe the culture at Google. Watch this:
JAMES DAMORE: There are definitely some political biases within Google that I was trying to shed light on in the document, and that they affect many parts of the business and for example, who they do business with, and what type of content they create, and I really think that those political biases need to be addressed.
CARLSON: It’s not just whistleblowers — excuse me, hidden camera footage obtained by Project Veritas shows a conversation with a woman called Jen Gennai. Her Google title is Head of Responsible Innovations in the Global Affairs Department.
In that video, Gennai says that Google is working specifically on products to make certain that Donald Trump does not win another election. Quote, “We’re also training our algorithms like if 2016 happened again … would the outcome be different? People were not putting that line in the sand … that they were not saying that what’s fair and what’s equitable, so we’re like, well, we’re a big company, we’re going to say it.”
In other words, we’re going to try and affect the outcome of the 2020 presidential campaign. Gennai goes on to blast Elizabeth Warren’s proposal to break Google up into two companies. Why? Check out this reasoning, quote, “All these smaller companies who don’t have the same resources that we do will be charged with preventing the next Trump situation. It’s like a small company cannot do that.”
So using a company’s dominance on the internet to sway the outcome of an election. That’s their plan. There should be a term for what Gennai is describing. It turns out there is a term, it’s a term you’ve heard constantly from talking heads on television for more than two years. It’s called hacking an election. Google wants to hack our election. They’re saying that out loud.
As we’ve been told over and over again by CNN and the Washington Post and the New York Times and all the other propagandists. Hacking an election is very bad; at minimum it warrants a multiyear investigation by law enforcement agencies. And yet, it’s happening now.
The Washington establishment has said they want to prevent election interference. But of course, that’s a lie. They just want to make sure they control the elections. That’s their only goal. That’s why they’re not attacking the real source of election interference, which is Silicon Valley.
Google, Facebook and their ilk, they have far more political power than Russia ever has or ever will have. No serious person doubts that.
But the people in charge of our country don’t care about any of that. Because when Google meddles in an election, Democrats benefit.
By the way, if you want to find that video, you can’t access it on YouTube. Google took it down. That’s not surprising. You can already be tossed off of YouTube and Facebook if you decide they’re using speech they don’t, like they’ll accuse you of hate speech, whatever that means.
Now they can toss you off their sites just for putting up videos that make you look bad. They probably won’t be banning any DNC videos anytime soon, you can be certain of that.
Meanwhile, this week, Ravelry, a knitting social networking website with eight million members banned all explicit support for Donald Trump and only for Donald Trump, and they got away with it. And because they have gotten away with it, other platforms almost certainly will do the same thing.
All of this is going on flagrantly in public, but most Republicans haven’t even responded to it. They haven’t reacted at all.
As soon as the 2016 election was over, the press and Big Tech openly began plotting on how to control the narrative in 2020, which is another way of saying control the election outcome in 2020, and using the scapegoat of fake news as an excuse to control the public discourse.
Republicans were in charge of Congress at the time; they did nothing. The White House commands a vast regulatory apparatus. They’ve sat motionless and done nothing. The only Republican is seems even interested at all in the subject and keeping Big Tech in check at all is new senator Josh Hawley, he just introduced a bill that would force tech companies to act as genuinely open platforms in order to receive valuable regulatory benefits. That’s the deal. They’re violating the deal, nobody else seems to care.
Passing Hawley’s bill does not seem to be a conservative priority, though, no one in Congress is talking about it. That’s a big mistake.
Successful political parties look out for their supporters and for the public at large and protect them from harm. Republicans, meanwhile, are sitting in a stupefied fog of libertarianism, doing nothing while their ideas are suppressed, and their supporters are silenced.
One day, they’ll look up and find they have no supporters at all; who will be the blame for that? Only themselves.
Dr. Robert Epstein is not a Republican, but he is the preeminent researcher into the subject. He’s a senior research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology, and he is again, the world’s great expert on the effect of the tech companies on political discourse. He joins us today. Dr. Epstein, thank you very much for coming on.
DR. ROBERT EPSTEIN: Always a pleasure.
CARLSON: Seeing this video tape, reading the quotes from this Google executive, does this confirm what you’ve said in the past? Are you surprised by this? What’s your response?
EPSTEIN: I’m not surprised, in the least. It confirms in glowing terms, or in very ugly terms, if you want to look at it that way, that Google not only has the power to shift opinions and votes on a massive scale, but they exercise this power and this is what I measure in my research.
So I can tell you fairly precisely how many votes they can shift; I can tell you fairly precisely how many votes they shifted in 2018.
CARLSON: So why is that not hacking an election?
EPSTEIN: Well, it’s not hacking an election right now because Google and similar companies like Facebook are completely unregulated in the United States, so they can do whatever they please.
And if they all work together in 2020 to support the same presidential candidate, which is very likely, and probably it’ll be a candidate that I support, by the way, they can shift upwards of 15 million votes with no one knowing that they’ve been manipulated and without leaving a paper trail for authorities to trace.
CARLSON: So that’s it. There’s no election at that point. Our democracy is not real if that’s allowed to happen, correct?
EPSTEIN: Well, democracy becomes an illusion. Now, there are actions one can take. I’ve set up so far, the only two big monitoring systems that anyone has built to actually look over people’s shoulder as they’re doing election related online activities, and to aggregate that information and see what they are being shown by these big companies.
Now in 2020, I’m actually trying right now to raise funds to build a large scale monitoring system to keep an eye on these companies and to catch them in the act, literally catch them, when they are manipulating votes and opinions. And in my opinion, that’s the only way we can stop them. There are no laws in place that can stop them at the moment.
CARLSON: Calling attention to it might be the first step and you’ve done more than anyone to do that. Dr. Epstein, thank you very much.
EPSTEIN: My pleasure.
Search engine researcher Dr. Robert Epstein has been continuing his investigation into the nefarious ways [...]]]>
Search engine researcher Dr. Robert Epstein has been continuing his investigation into the nefarious ways that Google manipulates search results to affect opinion and therefore votes in favor of the Democrats. What he has found is a skewing to show conservative candidates and ideas more negatively, with liberals getting positive search results. The degree of effect on voting is genuinely shocking because it changes election results.
There are several earlier posts on this blog about Dr. Epstein’s investigation of tech censorship, including interviews with Tucker Carlson (shown below).
Breitbart news provided an update to the ongoing investigation on Friday:
Research: Google Search Bias Flipped Seats for Democrats in Midterms, By Allum Bokhari, March 22, 2019
New research from psychologist and search engine expert Dr. Robert Epstein shows that biased Google searches had a measurable impact on the 2018 midterm elections, pushing tens of thousands of votes towards the Democrat candidates in three key congressional races, and potentially millions more in races across the country.
The study, from Epstein and a team at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology (AIBRT), analyzed Google searches related to three highly competitive congressional races in Southern California. In all three races, the Democrat won — and Epstein’s research suggests that Google search bias may have tipped them over the edge.
The research follows a previous study conducted in 2016 which showed that biased Google results pushed votes to Hillary Clinton in the presidential election. Democrats and Google executives have disputed these findings. . .
The flipping of conservative Orange County to be completely Democrat in the 2016 Congress was quite suspicious, even given the demographic change from immigration. There is also the issue of so-called “ballot harvesting” — legal only in California — where third parties, such as Democrat operatives, can deliver votes from homes to the registrar. What a convenient way to disappear Republican votes — very clever, Sacramento!
Below is a 36-minute interview with Dr. Epstein from a few days ago. In it, you will learn that Google brand home thermostats include microphones which allow the company to eavesdrop (!), and that the search expert uses StartPage for his own browsing.
Here’s a shorter interview, 17 minutes in length, with Glenn Beck from March 22 that explains basic issues, beginning with what Epstein does:
ROBERT EPSTEIN: (starting 2:45) There’s two different things I do, and unfortunately the LA Times just totally got this wrong. One is for more than six years I’ve been doing randomized controlled scientific studies showing the new power that companies like Google and Facebook have to shift opinions and votes without people knowing. And that’s very very rigorous research published in top scientific journals including the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
LA Times — did they even mention that? No.
And could anyone possibly find fault with that work? No, you can’t publish in those journals if your work is faulty.
Now the second thing that I’ve been doing, trying more quietly, is trying to learn how to build monitoring systems. These companies surveil us 24 hours a day. I’m the only person so far in the world who’s developed two monitoring systems for surveilling them. In other words, for figuring out what they’re showing people especially in the days leading up to elections and I did it in 2016. That got reported by the Washington Post, and I’ve done it again.
I did it again in 2018. That story just broke this morning and I am making progress in learning how to do this kind of monitoring and learning how to detect bias in the content that these companies are showing people. And once again, I caught Google not being readö (?), but I caught Google with their digital pants down and you know, what’s there they should be embarrassed about because I found very clear and strong liberal bias in content that they were showing people in the days leading up to the election. And that was enough if they were doing that nationwide, which I didn’t monitor the whole country, but if they had been doing what I found nationwide, that would have shifted upwards of 78.2 million votes to Democrats in across multiple races with no one having the slightest idea that they have been influenced in this way.
That’s why this is a very very dangerous kind of influence, that’s why we also need monitoring systems to be running on a large scale, and those are the two things I do — the scientific stuff and then developing monitoring systems.
The rest is worth a listen also, with its discussion of the great power of secret persuasion to worm its way into our beliefs and freedoms.
Spare audio:
]]>As Dr. Epstein noted about the search engine [...]]]>
As Dr. Epstein noted about the search engine Google from his research, “It’s frightening to me that this company with very strong political leanings has the power to shift millions of votes and shift opinions on a massive scale without people knowing that they are doing it and without being accountable to the public.”
But while the search shenanigans continue, as Epstein reports, “Google has been extremely good at keeping its secrets for almost 20 years, but in the last few months that has changed, and there have been quite a number of leaks, and we have seen a number of internal discussions there.”
So the Google company’s Stalinesque group-think may be breaking down somewhat under criticism from the public.
In addition, there may be some hope for action against Big Tech’s extreme influence on opinion from abroad. Epstein noted: “The Europeans see these companies as American, and they have been much tougher on them. I think we are going to see some pretty drastic actions taken against these companies by the E.U. in the next few years, and that could change their ability to operate worldwide.”
]]>Google is particularly powerful because it slants search results leftward.
Dr. Epstein described how Google influences political opinion during an August appearance with Tucker Carlson:
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.
Here is his article listing ten ways Big Tech can shift millions of votes through surreptitious means:
]]>10 Ways Big Tech Can Shift Millions of Votes in the November Elections—Without Anyone Knowing, by Robert Epstein, Epoch Times, September 26, 2018
A noted researcher describes 10 ways Google, Facebook, other companies could shift millions of votes in the US midterms
Authorities in the UK have finally figured out that fake news stories and Russian-placed ads are not the real problem. The UK Parliament is about to impose stiff penalties—not on the people who place the ads or write the stories, but on the Big Tech platforms that determine which ads and stories people actually see.
Parliament’s plans will almost surely be energized by the latest leak of damning material from inside Google’s fortress of secrecy: The Wall Street Journal recently reported on emails exchanged among Google employees in January 2017 in which they strategized about how to alter Google search results and other “ephemeral experiences” to counter President Donald Trump’s newly imposed travel ban. The company claims that none of these plans was ever implemented, but who knows?
While U.S. authorities have merely held hearings, EU authorities have taken dramatic steps in recent years to limit the powers of Big Tech, most recently with a comprehensive law that protects user privacy—the General Data Protection Regulation—and a whopping $5.1 billion fine against Google for monopolistic practices in the mobile device market. Last year, the European Union also levied a $2.7 billion fine against Google for filtering and ordering search results in a way that favored their own products and services. That filtering and ordering, it turns out, is of crucial importance.
As years of research I’ve been conducting on online influence has shown, content per se is not the real threat these days; what really matters is (a) which content is selected for users to see, and (b) the way that content is ordered in search results, search suggestions, newsfeeds, message feeds, comment lists, and so on. That’s where the power lies to shift opinions, purchases, and votes, and that power is held by a disturbingly small group of people.
I say “these days” because the explosive growth of a handful of massive platforms on the internet—the largest, by far, being Google and the next largest being Facebook—has changed everything. Millions of people and organizations are constantly trying to get their content in front of our eyes, but for more than 2.5 billion people around the world—soon to be more than 4 billion—the algorithms of Google and Facebook determine what material will be seen and where it will turn up in various lists.
In randomized, controlled, peer-reviewed research I’ve conducted with thousands of people, I’ve shown repeatedly that when people are undecided, I can shift their opinions on just about any topic just by changing how I filter and order the information I show them. I’ve also shown that when, in multiple searches, I show people more and more information that favors one candidate, I can shift opinions even farther. Even more disturbing, I can do these things in ways that are completely invisible to people and in ways that don’t leave paper trails for authorities to trace.
Worse still, these new forms of influence often rely on ephemeral content—information that is generated on the fly by an algorithm and then disappears forever, which means that it would be difficult, if not impossible, for authorities to reconstruct. If, on Election Day this coming November, Mark Zuckerberg decides to broadcast go-out-and-vote reminders mainly to members of one political party, how would we be able to detect such a manipulation? If we can’t detect it, how would we be able to reduce its impact? And how, days or weeks later, would we be able to turn back the clock to see what happened?
Of course, companies like Google and Facebook emphatically reject the idea that their search and newsfeed algorithms are being tweaked in ways that could meddle in elections. Doing so would undermine the public’s trust in their companies, spokespeople have said. They insist that their algorithms are complicated, constantly changing, and subject to the “organic” activity of users.
This is, of course, sheer nonsense. Google can adjust its algorithms to favor any candidate it chooses no matter what the activity of users might be, just as easily as I do in my experiments. As legal scholar Frank Pasquale noted in his recent book “The Black Box Society,” blaming algorithms just doesn’t cut it; the responsibility for what an algorithm does should always lie with the people who wrote the algorithm and the companies that deployed the algorithm. Alan Murray, president of Fortune, recently framed the issue profoundly: “Rule one in the Age of AI: Humans remain accountable for decisions, even when made by machines.”
Given that 95 percent of donations from Silicon Valley generally go to Democrats, it’s hard to imagine that the algorithms of companies like Facebook and Google don’t favor their favorite candidates. A newly leaked video of a 2016 meeting at Google shows without doubt that high-ranking Google executives share a strong political preference, which could easily be expressed in algorithms. The favoritism might be deliberately programmed or occur simply because of unconscious bias. Either way, votes and opinions shift.
It’s also hard to imagine how, in any election in the world, with or without intention on the part of company employees, Google search results would fail to tilt toward one candidate. Google’s search algorithm certainly has no equal-time rule built into it; we wouldn’t want it to! We want it to tell us what’s best, and the algorithm will indeed always favor one dog food over another, one music service over another, and one political candidate over another. When the latter happens … votes and opinions shift.
Here are 10 ways—seven of which I am actively studying and quantifying—that Big Tech companies could use to shift millions of votes this coming November with no one the wiser. Let’s hope, of course, that these methods are not being used and will never be used, but let’s be realistic too; there’s generally no limit to what people will do when money and power are on the line.
1. Search Engine Manipulation Effect (SEME)
Ongoing research I began in January 2013 has shown repeatedly that when one candidate is favored over another in search results, voting preferences among undecided voters shift dramatically—by 20 percent or more overall, and by up to 80 percent in some demographic groups. This is partly because people place inordinate trust in algorithmically generated output, thinking, mistakenly, that algorithms are inherently objective and impartial.
But my research also suggests that we are conditioned to believe in high-ranking search results in much the same way that rats are conditioned to press levers in Skinner boxes. Because most searches are for simple facts (“When was Donald Trump born?”), and because correct answers to simple questions inevitably turn up in the first position, we are taught, day after day, that the higher a search result appears in the list, the more true it must be. When we finally search for information to help us make a tough decision (“Who’s better for the economy, Trump or Clinton?”), we tend to believe the information on the web pages to which high-ranking search results link.
(Continues)
In a September 20 segment, Carlson examined the Google response to President Trump’s so-called “Muslim ban” (a temporary measure which was [...]]]>
In a September 20 segment, Carlson examined the Google response to President Trump’s so-called “Muslim ban” (a temporary measure which was quite popular among GOP voters according to a Rasmussen poll). But Google employees thought that shutting the door even a little on Western Civilization’s historic enemy was just mean.
Remember that under the Obama administration, Muslim immigrants got priority, so it’s only fair for President Trump to chill in response (Chart: Obama Admin. On Pace to Issue One Million Green Cards to Migrants from Majority-Muslim Countries, Breitbart.com, June 17, 2016).
Much of this criticism is based on the work of psychologist Dr. Robert Epstein (@DrREpstein), who has penetrated Big Tech’s propensity to manipulate in favor of liberal causes and politicians. One of the worst secret influencers is what Google search turns up. See Tucker’s interview with Dr. Epstein here: Big Tech Threatens to Secretly Undermine American Elections.
Back to Thursday’s report:
Spare audio:
]]>TUCKER CARLSON: Tonight, we have a development in our ongoing exclusive investigation into the behavior of Google. There are new emails first obtained by this show.
Now Google, as you know, is the most powerful company in the history of the world. Virtually all human information flows through its software. And for that reason, Google shapes much of how the world understands reality.
At the heart of Google’s business is its search engine which has a virtual monopoly on search in this country and others. Google search succeeds because it is blindingly efficient but also because it is perceived as honest. When you search for a term on Google, the most popular results come to the top. The process is straightforward and democratic: that’s what most people think. That’s how it’s perceived, and that’s why the world trusts Google.
But what if Google was lying to you? What if the results that you got were secretly weighted to get you to vote a certain way, to believe a certain thing? That would affect a lot of people and a lot of votes.
In fact, it would be impossible to have a real democracy under circumstances like that. A small number of incredibly rich people would be in charge of everything including your perceptions.
Well that is a major concern for all of us because Google is a very political company. We recently showed you email evidence of the Google effort to collude with a left-wing group in support of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
Now tonight, we have internal documents that show that Google employees discussed corrupting the company’s search engine to push propaganda on hundreds of millions of unsuspecting users.
Here’s what happened. Shortly after taking office, President Trump issued his now-famous travel ban. Almost immediately after that, Google employees began plotting ways to undermine the President’s Executive Order. On January 29th, a Google Product Marketing Manager named Mackenzie Thomas sent an email to a group of fellow employees. “There is a large brainstorm going on throughout the marketing org” she wrote, brainstorming about how to respond to Trump’s order.
Among Thomas’ ideas was “To actively counter algorithmically biased results for search terms such as Islam, Iran, Mexico, Latino and so forth.” In other words, Google employees wanted to alter the search results to make them more positive in certain cases for political reasons. Thomas also suggested promoting links for making donations to organizations fighting the travel ban.
This, of course, would be completely dishonest and unethical behavior. But Thomas’ colleagues at Google seemed to approve of it strongly. Product Manager Rami Banna, for example, replied this way. “We’re absolutely in, Mackenzie, anything you need. We’ll put together a list of orgs with Meryl and HL team.”
Another employee named Stacey Chen added that group she thought Google should promote included the ACLU, the Immigration Defense Project, the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee and the National Immigration Law Center. All of those groups were at the time agitating against the President’s immigration ban.
Even at least one person on the chain seemed to realize how dangerous and out of the ordinary this conversation was. A Google employee called Clement Wolf commented that he was “very much in favor of Google stepping up” but was wondering “How partisan we want to be on this? To the extent of my knowledge, we’d be breaching precedent if we only gave highlights access to organizations that support a certain view.”
We contacted Google about these remarkable emails and the reply to us is here in full.
“These emails were just a brainstorm of ideas, none of which were ever implemented. Google has never manipulated its search results or modified any of its products to promote a particular political ideology – not in the current campaign season, not during the 2016 election, and not in the aftermath of President Trump’s Executive Order on immigration. Our processes and policies would not have allowed for any manipulation of search results to promote political ideologies.”
Left unanswered by Google was why anyone would believe that statement for a second. Nor did Google say anything about the employees on that email chain. Presumably, they still work at Google which is remarkable. If you ran a bank and caught your tellers brainstorming about how to rob the vault, would they still work for you? Remember that Google fired an engineer called James Damore last summer almost instantly.
The CEO flew back from family vacation to fire him. Why? Because Damore was caught expressing mildly conservatives ideas in a private memo. Here, Google employees are plotting to subvert our entire public conversation secretly. But that’s fine with Google. It shouldn’t be fine with any of us or with the U.S. Congress. Google executives are scheduled to testify on Capitol Hill next week. The scheduled topic is privacy. But it would be nice if at least one elected representative asked about this because it’s much scarier than anything Russia ever attempted.
Peter Schweizer wrote “Clinton Cash.” He now has a fantastic new documentary called “The Creepy Line” about big tech and he joins us tonight. Are you surprised by this?
PETER SCHWEIZER: Not really. It’s just further confirmation that Google has been cooking the books as it relates to search.
And you’re absolutely right. I mean this would be like a company having a brainstorming session on how we’re going to fiddle with the books in accounting. Then you’re going to step back and say “No, we were just having a brainstorming session.”
It speaks to the culture of the company. And the culture of the company is they are prepared to put their thumb on the scale and shift the debate in favor of the direction that they want to go.
CARLSON: But this is so corrupt that it’s — I was stunned by it, and I was worried that these emails were not authentic because it’s such a big . . . so search is the core of Google’s business. It’s many different things, Google, but basically, it’s a search engine. It was built on the back of one. And the promise has always been that they’re not lying to you. But they are.
SCHWEIZER: That’s right. And this is really the third strike as far as I’m concerned. The first strike, of course, is the commercial search. When travel websites and people like Yelp were complaining that they were, you know, tilting the algorithm, you know, against them to others, Google said “Absolutely not. We would never do that.”
We now know the Federal Trade Commission, the EU, and others have looked at this and said Google was fiddling with the algorithm. The second strike as far as I’m concerned was the work done by Dr. Robert Epstein which shows clearly in 2016 that search was tilted to favor Hillary Clinton. This is strike three. It shows that the culture of the company is such that they’re very happy having a free and open conversation about manipulating the algorithm on a highly political subject.
CARLSON: But I don’t understand. I mean so people go to jail for violating our campaign finance laws because they put an extra ad on some cable channel nobody watches. This is the most powerful company in the world.
How can we have a democracy in a country where Google can just get whoever it wants elected by lying to us through the search function?
SCHWEIZER: It’s a great example, Tucker, of regulations and campaign finance laws not keeping up at all with where we are in technology. Nobody could see when we pass laws about in-kind contributions to campaigns from companies that something like this would happen.
But this is the ultimate, the ultimate campaign contribution. This is not like, you know, Exxon giving gasoline to a political campaign. This is a company secretly tipping the scales in favor of candidates or causes or beliefs that they have. It’s done in secret. We don’t know how extensive it’s happening. And 80 to 90 percent of search in the world is basically done through Google, so they have complete dominance in this area.
CARLSON: And the Congress does nothing. And I can think of at least one Republican senator who I believe has been bought off by Google. I don’t think he’s alone. At some point it might be worth naming who those people are. Peter, great to see you.
SCHWEIZER: Thanks, Tucker.
During an August appearance with Tucker, Dr. Epstein remarked, “So I have an article coming out very soon about ten different ways that these [...]]]>
During an August appearance with Tucker, Dr. Epstein remarked, “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.”
He also calls Google a “surveillance tool” that should be avoided.
Dr. Epstein recommends the upcoming film “The Creepy Line” in which he appears.
He appeared on the September 12 edition of Breitbart News radio, where a topic was the recently leaked video of Google headquarters bemoaning the Trump election in 2016. He noted that many companies have political leanings, but none have “the power that Google has to shift the thinking, the opinions, the values, the attitudes, the voting preferences, the purchases of more than two billion people around the world without people knowing that they are doing it — that’s the difference.”
His USA Today opinion piece is particularly timely with the fall election coming up:
]]>Not just conservatives: Google and Big Tech can shift millions of votes in any direction, By Robert Epstein, USA Today, September 13, 2018
Donald Trump is more right than he knows. My research suggests Google and Big Tech can manipulate voters in ways that threaten democracy and autonomy.
I am not a Trump supporter. I’m not even a conservative. But I love America and democracy, and I defend truth when I see it, and President Donald Trump is not only justified in expressing misgivings about Google and other tech companies — he seems to have no idea just how big a threat Google-and-the-Gang pose to both democracy and human autonomy.
In a forthcoming article in Fast Company, I have detailed 10 different methods Big Tech companies can use to shift millions of votes in the midterm elections with no one knowing they’re doing so and without leaving a paper trail for authorities to trace — upwards of 12 million votes, by my calculations. These powerful new means of manipulation make fake news stories and targeted ads, sources of influence that are both competitive and visible, look like kid stuff.
I’ve been a research scientist for nearly 40 years, and for more than five years now, I’ve been discovering, studying and quantifying new methods of influence that the internet has made possible. Two of these methods — the Search Engine Manipulation Effect (SEME, pronounced “seem”) and the Search Suggestion Effect (SSE) — are among the most powerful types of influence ever discovered in the behavioral sciences.
Google search results affect elections
My randomized, controlled and peer-reviewed research on SEME shows that when one candidate is favored in search results, that can easily shift the voting preferences of undecided voters by 20 percent or more — up to 80 percent in some demographic groups. My new research on SSE suggests that (a) Google is manipulating opinions from the very first character people type into the Google search bar, and (b) by manipulating search suggestions (those phrases they flash at you while you’re typing your search term), Google can turn a 50/50 split among undecided voters into an astonishing 90/10 split.
Those boxes they often show you at the top of the results page, the so-called “featured snippets,” also shift votes and opinions, possibly boosting the impact of SEME by between 10 and 30 percent.
Is there evidence of actual favoritism in Google’s search engine? Well, the European Union certainly thinks so, having fined Google $2.7 billion last year for having biased search results. In the months leading up to the 2016 election here in the U.S., I led a team that used objective methods to preserve 13,207 online election-related searches and the 98,044 web pages to which the search results linked. These data showed that Google’s search results favored Hillary Clinton (whom I supported) in all 10 positions on the first page of search results — enough, perhaps, to have shifted two or three million votes in her direction over time.
Was this just, as Google likes to claim, an “organic” phenomenon — you know, something Google’s algorithm did all by itself based on user preferences? (What an idiotic claim. I mean, who wrote the algorithm that acts on those preferences?) Maybe — except that I found pro-Clinton favoritism in searches originating in red states, not just in blue states.
As for Google’s vacuous denials about having political preferences — defended uncritically in recent days by reporters like CNN’s Hadas Gold — let’s review: Google’s Eric Schmidt not only helped supervise Obama’s tech teams in 2008 and 2012, he also offered to supervise Hillary Clinton’s entire tech operation and bankrolled a highly secretive tech operation, The Groundwork, to assist her campaign. Clinton’s Chief Technology Officer was Stephanie Hannon, a former Google executive, and more than 95 percent of the company’s political donations have gone to Democratic candidates in recent elections.
That said, the problem is not about hurting conservatives; it’s much bigger than that. Google has also been accused of suppressing socialists and progressive groups. And whatever the company’s political preferences are today, they could change tomorrow, both in the U.S. and other countries. Democracy itself is at stake here.
Google’s ability to shift votes is unparalleled
There’s nothing wrong with a company supporting one candidate or party — Microsoft was one of Clinton’s biggest donors, after all — but no company in the history of the world has had the ability to shift votes and opinions to the extent and on the scale that Google has. When there are signs that Google is supporting one candidate or cause, we need to pay close attention to what it is showing people. (Continues)
Facebook and Google manipulate what users see in order to effect their opinions. Dr. Robert Epstein has been researching the nefarious activities of the tech titans and [...]]]>
Facebook and Google manipulate what users see in order to effect their opinions. Dr. Robert Epstein has been researching the nefarious activities of the tech titans and appeared with Tucker several times to explain the risk to representative government. The quotes below come from a longer piece, Big Tech Threatens to Secretly Undermine America’s Elections.
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.
On Monday’s program, Tucker cited a specific example of Google working to elect Hilary Clinton.
]]>TUCKER CARLSON: For two years, the alleged threat that Russia poses to our elections has been official Washington’s obsession. The usual business of government has come to a halt as Democrats and their allies in the press fret that Russian agents may be interfering with our democracy. The root of these fears: a handful of Russian ads on Facebook that almost no one saw, and a small number of efforts to hack Democratic Party email accounts.
Now, let’s assume that all these deeply worried people are sincere — that they really care about the integrity of our democracy. Then why has almost nobody said anything about the tech monopolies that dominate our exchange of information in this country? If a few dozen Facebook ads are enough to subvert an election, shouldn’t we be worried about Facebook itself, which controls literally billions of ads?
A couple of times on this show, social scientist Robert Epstein has pointed out that Google alone could determine the outcome of almost any American election, just by altering its search suggestions — we’d never know what happened.
“Oh,” say tech defenders, “Don’t worry. These are businesses. They exist to make money, not to push political agendas.”
It turns out that’s not true, and we can prove it. An email obtained exclusively by this show reveals that a senior Google employee deployed the company’s resources in 2016 to increase voter turnout in ways she believed would help Clinton win the election.
The email we obtained came from a woman named Eliana Murillo, the former head Google’s multicultural marketing department. She sent it on November 9, 2016; that was one day after the presidential election. Her email was subsequently forwarded by two Google vice presidents to more staff members in the company.
In her email, Murillo touts Google’s multi-faceted efforts to boost Hispanic voter turnout in the election. She notes that Latinos voted in record-breaking numbers, especially in states like Florida, Nevada and Arizona, the last of which she describes as quote, “a key state for us.” She bragged that the company used its power to ensure that millions of people saw certain hashtags and social media impressions, with the goal of influencing their behavior during the election.
Elsewhere in the email, Murillo says the company quote, “[Google] supported partners like Voto Latino to pay for rides to the polls in key states.” She describes this assistance as quote “a silent donation.” Murillo then says that Google helped Voto Latino create ad campaigns to promote its rides.
Now officially, Voto Latino is a non-partisan entity, but that’s a sham. Voto Latino is vocally partisan. Recently, the group declared that Hispanics — all Hispanics — are in President Trump’s quote “crosshairs,” and said they plan to respond by registering another million additional Hispanic voters in the next presidential cycle. Voto Latino is a group with clear political goals, goals that Google supported in 2016. We asked both Google and Voto Latino for clarification — what exactly did Murillo mean by a “silent donation.” This is potentially significant legal question; neither company responded to us.
At the end of her email, Murillo makes it clear that Google was working to get Hillary Clinton elected. This wasn’t a get out the vote effort — whatever they say — it was not aimed at all potential voters. It wasn’t even aimed at a balanced cross-section of subgroups. Google didn’t try to get out the vote among, say, Christian Arabs in Michigan, or Persian Jews in Los Angeles — they sometimes vote Republican.
It was aimed only at one group, a group that Google cynically assumed would vote exclusively for the Democratic Party. Furthermore, this mobilization effort was targeted not at the entire country but swing states vital to the Hillary campaign. This wasn’t an exercise in civics: this was political consulting. It was, in effect, an in-kind contribution to the Hillary Clinton for President campaign.
In the end, Google was disappointed. As Murillo herself conceded quote, “Ultimately, after all was said and done, the Latino community did come out to vote, and completely surprised us. We never anticipated that 29 percent of Latinos would vote for Trump. No one did. If you see a Latino Googler in the office, please give them a smile. They are probably hurting right now. You can rest assured that the Latinos of these blue states need your thoughts and prayers for them and their families. I had planned a vacation and thought I would be taking the time to celebrate. Now it will be time to reflect on how to continue to support my community through these difficult times.”
Nobody at the DNC was more upset by the results that Murillo. Google tried to get Hillary elected. They failed — this time. We reached out to Google. The company didn’t deny the email was real, or that it showed a clear political preference. Their only defense was that the activities it described were either non-partisan, or weren’t taken officially by the company. But of course, they were both. Plenty of people in Google knew what was going on, and we’ve seen no evidence that anyone at Google disapproved of it or tried to rein it in.
Two years later, Google is more powerful than it’s ever been, and the left has increasingly become radical in what it is willing to do to regain political power. What could Google be doing this election cycle to support its preferred candidates? What could they do in 2020? It’s a question almost nobody in Washington seems interested in even asking. They ought to be interested.