Researcher Takes on Google’s Subversive Electioneering
Big tech companies like Google have the power to “shift upwards of 12 million votes with no one knowing they’re doing so,” a research psychologist told Radio Sputnik Thursday, underscoring the influence profit-making firms can have on public elections.
That, he said, is too much power for "just a couple of executives" and is why tech giant monopolies need to be thought of as public utilities and not private entities.
"Research I have been directing in recent years suggests that Google, Inc., has amassed far more power to control elections — indeed, to control a wide variety of opinions and beliefs — than any company in history has ever had," research psychologist Robert Epstein says.
In 2015, Dr. Robert Epstein, senior research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology, wrote a groundbreaking paper about the Search Engine Manipulation Effect (SEME), published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.
"Google's search algorithm can easily shift the voting preferences of undecided voters by 20 percent or more — up to 80 percent in some demographic groups — with virtually no one knowing they are being manipulated," Epstein wrote in Politico at the time.
That kind of a margin could tilt an election, he noted. Indeed, Epstein's research shows that Google manipulated search results to display pro-Hillary Clinton results higher on the page than others.
With Google reaching a billion users last year, according to The Verge, and the company collecting over $100 billion a year in revenue, the tech giant has acquired an unheard-of power over how we think and how we access information.
Epstein spoke with Radio Sputnik's Loud & Clear Thursday about the next phase of his studies: an "electronic cat and mouse game," a system for collecting, monitoring and analyzing data that can identify and quantify "every single manipulation, every single kind of bias there is," to hold tech giants accountable.
https://sputniknews.com/analysis/201809211068216213-Researcher-Takes-on-Googles-Subversive-Electioneering/
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Epstein noted that court rulings repeatedly recognized Google's right to free speech as a private company. He further pointed out that Google, with "one of the highest profit margins of any country in history," can simply shrug off any fines leveled against it for its conduct — such as the European Union did earlier this year, when it fined Google $5.1 billion, or last year when it leveled a $2.7 billion fine against it for having biased search results.
Epstein told Radio Sputnik about what he called "a landmark article" by him that will be published in the periodical "Fast Company" in the next few days, which is presently titled, "How Big Tech Could Quietly Hijack Democracy: A Researcher Describes 10 Ways that the Big Tech Companies Can Shift Millions of Votes in the Midterm Elections Without Anyone Knowing."
"These are not old-fashioned techniques," he said, like mudslinging ads or untrue billboards and TV ads. "This is all clandestine, this is all invisible to users and all involves ephemeral content, which means it doesn't leave a paper trail. And it's all in the hands of just a couple of executives in the northwest corner of the United States. And it's affecting not just people here, it's affecting billions of people around the world… Something is wrong with this system."