A psychologist is accusing Google of manipulating American citizens to influence the outcome of the November midterm elections.
Robert Epstein and his research team from the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology have been monitoring online political content being sent to voters in swing states. As part of the research, the team is looking into search engine results on Google and Bing, messages displayed on Google’s homepage, tweets sent by Twitter, email suppression on Gmail, auto-play videos suggested on Google-owned YouTube, and so on.
The study found over 1.9 million “ephemeral experiences” that Google and other firms were using to “shift opinions and voting preferences,” Epstein wrote in a Nov. 6 article for the Daily Caller. “Ephemeral experiences” are short-lived content that immediately disappears without leaving a trace after user consumption.
The team expects such “ephemeral experiences” to number over 2.5 million by Election Day. Epstein has identified roughly a dozen new forms of online manipulation using ephemeral experiences which are almost exclusively controlled by Google and a few other tech firms.
The impact created by the experiences is “stunning,” Epstein says.
Search engine results that favor one political candidate were found to influence undecided voters so much that up to 80 percent of such people in some demographic groups shifted their voting preferences after only a single search.
“Carefully crafted search suggestions that flash at you while you are typing a search term can turn a 50/50 split among undecided voters into a 90/10 split with no one knowing they have been manipulated,” Epstein writes.
“A single question-and-answer interaction on a digital personal assistant can shift the voting preferences of undecided voters by more than 40 percent.”
Ahead of the 2022 election, “a high level of liberal bias” is being seen in Google search results in swing states like Arizona, Florida, and Wisconsin, Epstein wrote. Search results from Bing did not indicate such bias.
In multiple swing states, liberal news sources make up 92 percent of auto-play videos being sent to YouTube users, which can potentially shift “hundreds of thousands of votes” on Election Day, he warned.
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Robert Epstein: Inside Big Tech’s Manipulation Machine and How to Stop It
“They hold in their hands the power to change thinking and behavior on a massive scale, the power—in close elections anyway—to pick the winner, in country after country after country.”
I sit down with Dr. Robert Epstein, a senior research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology (AIBRT). He studied at Harvard University under B. F. Skinner, previously was editor-in-chief of “Psychology Today,” and founded the Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies. Today, he is perhaps best known for leading studies looking at how tech giants influence human behavior, and conducting extensive monitoring projects of bias in Google products and beyond. According to his team’s research, Google shifted at least 6 million votes in the 2020 elections.
“All these so-called free services, these services are not free. You pay for them with your freedom,” he says.
In this episode, he breaks down his team’s latest findings, detailed in his report “Google’s Triple Threat,” and major ways in which Big Tech companies secretly manipulate their users without leaving any paper trail. With Congress unable to come to any consensus on how to deal with Big Tech, he says he’s found another way to force Big Tech to stop.
Below are some links Epstein mentions in the interview:
Dr. Robert Epstein’s Privacy Tips
Report on Google’s Triple Threat
Taming Big Tech: The Case for Monitoring
More information on Dr. Epstein’s Google research
The American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology
Google Vote Reminders Only Went to Liberals, Not Conservatives for at Least 4 Days—Dr Robert Epstein
November 12, 2020
Dr. Robert Epstein: How Big Tech’s Algorithms Can Impact Opinions and Votes—and the 2020 Election
September 9, 2019
Google’s Power to Shift Elections—Zachary Vorhies, Greg Coppola and Dr. Robert Epstein
August 23, 2019
