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)
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.
In one segment of Friday’s show, Tucker interviewed Peter Schweizer, who has a new documentary coming out in September titled The Creepy Line (an odd title explained below). Here’s the trailer:
An eye-opening documentary, The Creepy Line reveals the stunning degree to which society is manipulated by Google and Facebook and blows the lid off the remarkably subtle – hence powerful – manner in which they do it.
The Creepy Line is a title taken from the words of former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, when during a 2010 interview he explained Google’s code of conduct: “The Google policy on a lot of things is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it.”
However, as Dr. Robert Epstein explains in the film, “Google crosses the creepy line every day.” Containing interviews with Jordan B. Peterson, Peter Schweizer, and others, The Creepy Line offers an explosive look at the meddling and intervening done by Google and Facebook on their supposedly “neutral platforms.”
The Creepy Line takes the conversation about data privacy and control further than ever before by examining what Google and Facebook do once they control a user’s data. Offering first-hand accounts, scientific experiments and detailed analysis, The Creepy Line examines what is at risk when these two tech titans have free reign to utilize the public’s most private and personal data.
Here’s the Tucker Carlson Tonight segment discussing the film:
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