Obviously this has to be addressed if only to establish net neutrality for the actual providers of information distribution services. The potential effect is more than enough to make it dangerous for at least a couple of election cycles.
Recall how media manipulation clearly put Obama into the presidency for two terms and likely uncounted lower tier legislators as well It was completely visible.
Then recall how the electors then hid their intentions when Trump emerged to address their concerns.
We may never know just how much the 2016 election was rigged. This shows you just how much can be accomplished. There is always a hard core base that will vote for your side. Then there is those who will vote for no other side, but may simply not show up. Then there is the normally loyal; but can be persuaded. Trump landed those.
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A Google badge in Sydney on Sept. 14, 2007. (Greg Wood/AFP/Getty Images)
Google Likely Shifted Undecided Voters in 2018 Election, Perhaps Millions, Researcher Says
March 25, 2019
Updated: March 25, 2019
Google may have skewed the results of the 2018 midterm
elections by millions of votes, according to research by psychologist
Robert Epstein.
Epstein had about 130 anonymous “field agents” in Orange County,
California, and about 30 more across the country who had all their
election-related Google search results recorded, more than 47,000 of
them, including nearly 400,000 web pages that the search results linked
to.
“We found significant pro-liberal bias on Google—enough, quite
easily, to have flipped all three congressional districts in Orange
County from Republican to Democrat,” Epstein said in an emailed
statement.
Democrats indeed flipped in 2018 the three congressional seats in the county that Epstein zeroed in for his study.
Compared to search engines Bing and Yahoo, Epstein and his team found
the results from Google were “significantly more liberal than
non-Google search results on all 10 days leading up to and including
Election Day and in all 10 positions of search results on the first page
of search results,” according to the summary of a paper Epstein plans
to present at the annual meeting of the Western Psychological
Association in Pasadena, California, in April. The summary was provided
by Epstein to The Epoch Times.
They
estimated the bias, based on ratings collected from thousands of people
crowdsourced through sites like MTurk, he explained. Epstein further
looked at news sources in the search results and calculated their
political bias, based on ideological media map published in 2017 by Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center.
On a scale of -1 to 1, from the most conservative to the most
liberal, Google search results had an average bias of 0.14, while
non-Google search results averaged -0.13.
“If that level of bias had been present nationwide, at least 4.6
million undecided voters would have shifted toward Democratic
candidates; that’s a modest estimate,” Epstein said. “In the extreme
case, if all of those 4.6 million people had voted a straight Democratic
ticket, that would have given Democratic candidates in different races
78.2 million votes.”
He said extrapolating the Orange County results nationwide is “more
than reasonable,” since the field agents in other areas experienced “the
same level of bias nationwide.”
Power to Sort
While Epstein considers himself liberal, he’s been outspoken about
his concern about Google’s power to influence political currents of the
country.
In a January Epoch Times op-ed,
he explained that even innocent-looking initiatives of the company,
such as turning its logo on the search page from Google to “Go Vote” on
Election Day 2018, could have notably favored the Democrats.
Since Google users tend to be more left-leaning on average, the Go
Vote reminder was likely a net gain to the Democrats, he pointed out.
Given that more than 90 percent of political donations from Google employees have gone to Democrats since 2004, and Google’s leaders were said to have been dismayed by Trump’s win, Epstein doubted the company would take steps against its own ideological leanings.
Google executives have repeatedly denied that the political
preferences of their staff leak into their products; they’ve also called
Epstein’s past research “flawed.” Yet Google acknowledges that it not
only sorts search results by relevance, but also by how “authoritative”
the company deems the sources to be. Google even manually edits the
search results on “controversial” topics, according to internal documents obtained by Breitbart.
It’s exactly the power to rank and sort where Epstein sees the power of influence in the crowded information world of today.
“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,” he wrote in an Epoch Times op-ed on Sept. 26.
Update: The article has been updated with additional details provided by Robert Epstein.
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