Google’s threat to democracy
Conservatives have long complained that social media — especially Google, Facebook and Twitter — discriminate against them. They claim that their websites are buried or don’t appear on Google searches; they claim that Facebook and Twitter censor their posts.
Almost all of these complaints are anecdotal without much rigorous data to support them. For example, last fall a National Review article described how typing in “top races Republican” got a squiggly underline, suggesting that the author had misspelled the word “races.” Beneath it ran Google’s helpful correction: “top racist Republican.”
Replacing the word “Republican” with the word “Democrat” didn’t get a “racist” correction. Instead, Google responded with “best Democratic races to donate to.” The search request said nothing about donating to a campaign; Google was fronting for Democratic politicians.
Full disclosure: I am a longtime Bing user. Nonetheless, I tried to repeat this using Google only to discover that Google has seen the handwriting on the wall: I got straight answers this month to identical queries.
When he appeared at a congressional hearing, Google’s CEO testified that the “company’s search engine had no bias against conservatives,” a claim disputed by Republicans.
Enter Dr. Robert Epstein, a Harvard-educated psychologist and former editor of “Psychology Today.” Epstein is a lifelong California Democrat and was a Hillary Clinton supporter. He’s written for TIME magazine, U.S. News & World Report, USA Today, Dissent, The Hill, Huffington Post, and the Daily Caller. He’s published 15 books and over 300 scientific and mainstream articles.
Epstein has done extensive research in both the U.S. and in other countries into how Internet search results affect undecided voters. His 2015 peer-reviewed research paper on the subject has been downloaded over 200,000 times, and its conclusions have been replicated by the Max Planck Institute in Germany, validating its credibility.
In the weeks leading up to the 2016 election, Epstein began a rigorously documented study of possible Google political bias. He saved the results of over 13,000 searches using Google, Bing, and Yahoo conducted by a diverse set of Americans.
The result: Google searches made from both blue and red states consistently returned results favorable to Hillary Clinton on their first page of results. In contrast, Bing and Yahoo results were more balanced.
Epstein has shown that “biased search results can easily produce shifts in the opinions and voting preference of undecided voters by 20 percent or more — up to 80 percent in some demographic groups.”
Epstein applied these findings to the 2016 presidential election. In Congressional testimony last month, he stated that “Google’s search algorithm likely impacted undecided voters in a way that gave at least 2.6 million votes to Hillary Clinton.” He added that the number could be as high as 10 million votes.
The possibility that Google steered 2.6 million or more votes to Hillary Clinton is both stunning and frightening. Her popular vote margin was a little less than 2.9 million. If even a little over half of those previously undecided voters instead would have voted for Trump, he’d have won the popular vote and possibly increased his Electoral College total as well.
Can Epstein possibly be right? As described in a Los Angeles Times article, independent researchers have acknowledged the importance of his work. The real issues, they say, are how little we know about unseen search algorithms and how voters respond to their results.
Princeton professor Jacob Shapiro notes, “We need to understand the potential political impact of these underneath-the-hood choices” by tech companies such as Google.
So why haven’t we heard more about Epstein’s findings? Certainly Google and the reliably-liberal mainstream media hope his work remains buried. And his conclusions about 2016 are water under the bridge.
But what about 2020? Google knows it is under far greater scrutiny with a Republican administration than it would have been with a Clinton administration. As my quick check showed, Google has at least cleaned up its act in part.
Nonetheless, Google’s threat to fair and open elections remains. The clever folks in Silicon Valley certainly can find new ways to skew search results to favor their chosen candidates and causes without leaving a paper trail.
Despite his personal political leanings which align with Google, Epstein stated in his testimony that, “No private company should have either the right or the power to manipulate large populations without their knowledge.”
I am intrigued with Epstein’s proposed solution. Google’s power lies in its massive, ever-evolving data base of web sites and the people who use them. Epstein suggests that this data base be turned over to a non-profit enterprise that would continue to update it and make it available to all search engines.
Google’s near-monopoly on search would be replaced with a variety of competitors, some favoring the left, others the right and almost certainly a number who claim complete non-partiality. Just as we choose our news sources knowing their political tendencies, we could select search engines as well.
Democrats rail about the monopoly power of big businesses. No big business comes close to Google’s power. And no big business is in a stronger position to threaten our democracy.
The viewpoints expressed above are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of The Independent.
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“No private company should have either the right or the power to manipulate large populations without their knowledge.”
Imagine how pissed off Epstein would be if he understood how The Federal Reserve System operates.