According to Senator Cruz, the most generous donor, in terms of cash to the Clinton campaign in 2016 was Alphabet, the owner of Google. How does one calculate the value of the undeclared donations of search engine tampering and selective “Get out and vote” messages to voters analysed by the AI as being likely Hillary voters?
90% of searches by Americans are via Google.
So, should it be legal for private companies to rig elections by making undeclared “in kind” campaign contributions that subliminally shift votes without voters being told they are being in this way manipulated?
You are not being truthful. There are links within his testimony to the studies and papers which contain the data and analyses that undergird his statements presented to the committee.
Why do you call the author “Democratic leaning.”
And what do you favor to address the issue. Are you proposing government intervene in how Google is run?
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On the surface, the “Go Vote” reminder looks like a public service, but if you’ve followed any of the recent leaks of emails and videos from Google, you know how staunchly liberal Google’s leaders and employees are. More than 90 percent of political donations from Google employees have gone to Democrats since 2004, and Google’s leaders were distraught following Trump’s win.
At a company-wide meeting on Nov. 11, 2016, Ruth Porat, Google’s chief financial officer, was unequivocal in her response. After acknowledging her strong support for Hillary Clinton (whom I also supported, by the way), she added: “Our values are strong. We will fight to protect them, and we will use the great strength and resources and reach we have to continue to advance really important values.”
Would Google display a “Go Vote” reminder to its U.S. users on Election Day—a reminder that would be seen by Americans more than 500 million times that day—if there was the slightest chance that doing so would give more votes to Republicans than to Democrats? It seems unlikely, but how could an apparently benign reminder like this help Democrats?
To understand how this works, you need to look at demographics. As you’ll see, no matter how you cut this cake, Google’s “Go Vote” reminder generates more votes for Democrats than for Republicans. What’s more, the precise number of votes can be calculated in advance.
Excellent research.
"Google is liberal so if they ask people to vote, it must be helping liberals. "
In 2016, biased search results generated by Google’s search algorithm likely impacted undecided voters in a way that gave at least 2.6 million votes to Hillary Clinton (whom I supported). I know this because I preserved more than 13,000
election-related searches conducted by a diverse group of Americans on Google, Bing, and Yahoo in the weeks leading up to the election, and Google search results – which dominate search in the U.S. and worldwide – were significantly biased in
favor of Secretary Clinton in all 10 positions on the first page of search results in both blue states and red states.
These aren’t cited.
No. What do you see that is interesting? Is it that news articles and opinion pieces have been written based on Epstein’s papers?
- In the weeks leading up to the 2018 election, bias in Google’s search results may have shifted upwards of 78.2 million votes to the candidates of one political party (spread across hundreds of local and regional races). This number is based on data captured by my 2018 monitoring system, which preserved more than 47,000 election-related searches on Google, Bing, and Yahoo, along with the nearly 400,000 web pages to which the search results linked. Strong political bias toward one party was evident, once again, in Google searches (Epstein & Williams, 2019).
Cites himself. No links to data.
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There is an extensive list of references working backwards from 2019 he provides. You would find the data and analysis in the paper listed as “Epstein and Williams, 2019.”
Epstein, R., & Williams, E. (2019, April). Evidence of systematic political bias in online
search results in the 10 days leading up to the 2018 U.S. midterm elections. Paper
presented at the 99th annual meeting of the Western Psychological Association,
Pasadena, CA.
I do speak the truth. His analyses are based on IF Google did the things he asserts.
He has no proof they actually DID those things…but uses clever juxtapositions such as “94% of Google’s staff are liberal”, “they are the premier numbers crunchers. If I could do these calculations you KNOW they can and probably did” to lead his audience to a worst case conclusion that’s not in the evidence he provides…and indeed says is impossible at this time to provide.
He can get away with this because he knows the audience he’s trying to reach is already predisposed to believe Google did something nefarious against conservatives…a belief he tries to strengthen by including irrelevant and unconnected stories of Google’s other “misdeeds”.
He’s using his training and experience on you and you don’t even realize it.
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He says he has saved the searches and applied the methodology of his 2015 paper. I expect he would give access to Cruz to that data.
“I know the number of votes that shifted because I have conducted dozens of
controlled experiments in the U.S. and other countries that measure precisely how
opinions and votes shift when search results favor one candidate, cause, or
company. I call this shift “SEME” – the Search Engine Manipulation Effect. My
first scientific paper on SEME was published in the Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences (PNAS) in 2015 (https://is.gd/p0li8V) (Epstein & Robertson,
2015a) and has since been accessed or downloaded from PNAS’s website more
than 200,000 times. SEME has also been replicated by a research team at one of
the Max Planck Institutes in Germany.”
- My recent research demonstrates that Google’s “autocomplete” search suggestions can turn a 50/50 split among undecided voters into a 90/10 split without people’s awareness (http://bit.ly/2EcYnYI) (Epstein, Mohr, & Martinez, 2018). A growing body of evidence suggests that Google is manipulating people’s thinking and behavior from the very first character people type into the search box.
- Google has likely been determining the outcomes of upwards of 25 percent of the national elections worldwide since at least 2015. This is because many races are very close and because Google’s persuasive technologies are very powerful (Epstein & Robertson, 2015a).
This one almost came close to being real research, except
I want to see Trump 's autocomplete from the same time as Hillary’s. His is from October 2017, Hillary’s is from August 2016. Why the gap? He does not justify it.
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There is a problem when he claims
and you’re telling me to look at a 2015 paper.
I want to see the new claim cited just like in the 2018 paper. Why is the only example a comparison from Oct 2017 to Aug 2016 for two different candidates. If the data exists as you claim, it should have been used in the 2018 paper instead of the above example.
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I know how to stop Big Tech companies dead in their tracks, and that brings me, finally, to monitoring systems and the proposal I published yesterday.
Back in 2015, a telephone call from Jim Hood, the attorney general of Mississippi, prompted me to start a years-long project in which I learned to monitor what Big Tech companies are showing real users. In early 2016, I launched my first large-scale, Neilsentype monitoring system that allowed my team to look over people’s shoulders and, with user permission, to capture the search results they were seeing on their computer screens before those results disappeared (Epstein, 2018d). I successfully deployed such systems in 2016 and 2018, and I’m raising funds now to build a much larger and more comprehensive system in early 2020*
I have to break in here. Where are the results from 2016 and 2018? Shouldn’t he show us that before trying to pitch for funding?
one that will allow us to catch Big Tech companies in the act – to instantly spot when Google is showing people politically biased search results; when Twitter is suppressing tweets sent by the President, Ann Coulter, or Elizabeth Warren; when Facebook is sending out “Register to Vote” reminders only to members of one party.
Didn’t he already catch them? Is he in front of the Senate to just promise results if he gets more money?
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Finally, yesterday I published an article explaining how Congress can quickly end Google’s worldwide monopoly on search (Epstein, 2019d). The solution to The Google Problem is to declare Google’s massive search index – the database the company uses to generate search results – to be a public commons, accessible by all, just as a 1956 consent decree forced AT&T to share all its patents. There is precedent in both law and in Google’s own business practices to justify taking this step.
Declaring Google’s index a commons will quickly give rise to thousands of search platforms like Google.com, each competing with Google, each providing excellent search results, each serving niche audiences, large and small, exactly like newspapers and television networks and websites do now. Search will become competitive, as it was during its early years, and democracy will be protected from Google’s secretive machinations.
Is this a joke?
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Bingo!
Most companies in general are too large today. A lot need to be broken up and regulated.
Media companies
Telecommunication companies
Agricultural companies
Chemical Companies
Banking Companies
Universities
And the list goes on…
Thank you for finally providing the peer review his work deserves… LOL
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Just the “liberal” ones…
