Wired: Google Search Algorithm Could Steal Presidency...
GOOGLE’S SEARCH ALGORITHM COULD STEAL THE PRESIDENCY
By ADAM ROGERS 08.06.15. 1:24 PM
IMAGINE AN ELECTION—A close one. You’re undecided. So you
type the name of one of the candidates into your search engine of choice.
(Actually, let’s not be coy here. In most of the world, one search engine
dominates; in Europe and North America, it’s Google.) And Google coughs up, in
fractions of a second, articles and facts about that candidate. Great! Now you
are an informed voter, right? But a study published this week says that the order
of those results, the ranking of positive or negative stories on the screen,
can have an enormous influence on the way you vote. And if the election is
close enough, the effect could be profound enough to change the outcome.
In other words: Google’s ranking algorithm for search
results could accidentally steal the presidency. “We estimate, based on win
margins in national elections around the world,” says Robert Epstein, a
psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology and
one of the study’s authors, “that Google could determine the outcome of upwards
of 25 percent of all national elections.”
Epstein’s paper combines a few years’ worth of
experiments in which Epstein and his colleague Ronald Robertson gave people
access to information about the race for prime minister in Australia in 2010,
two years prior, and then let the mock-voters learn about the candidates via a
simulated search engine that displayed real articles.
One group saw positive articles about one candidate
first; the other saw positive articles about the other candidate. (A control
group saw a random assortment.) The result: Whichever side people saw the
positive results for, they were more likely to vote for—by more than 48
percent. The team calls that number the “vote manipulation power,” or VMP. The
effect held—strengthened, even—when the researchers swapped in a single negative
story into the number-four and number-three spots. Apparently it made the
results seem even more neutral and therefore more trustworthy.
But of course that was all artificial—in the lab. So the
researchers packed up and went to India in advance of the 2014 Lok Sabha
elections, a national campaign with 800 million eligible voters. (Eventually
430 million people voted over the weeks of the actual election.) “I thought
this time we’d be lucky if we got 2 or 3 percent, and my gut said we’re gonna
get nothing,” Epstein says, “because this is an intense, intense election
environment.” Voters get exposed, heavily, to lots of other information besides
a mock search engine result.
The team found undecided voters and performed a version
of the same experiment. And again, VMP was off the charts. Even taking into
account some sloppiness in the data-gathering and a tougher time assessing
articles for their positive or negative valence, they got an overall VMP of 24
percent. “In some demographic groups in India we had as high as about 72
percent.”
The effect doesn’t have to be enormous to have an
enormous effect.
The fact that media, including whatever search and social
deliver, can affect decision-making isn’t exactly news. The “Fox News Effect”
says that towns that got the conservative-leaning cable channel tended to
become more conservative in their voting in the 2000 election. A well-known
effect called recency means that people make decisions based on the last thing
they heard. Placement on a list also has a known effect. And all that stuff
might be too transient to make it all the way to a voting booth, or get swamped
by exposure to other media. So in real life VMP is probably much less
pronounced.
But the effect doesn’t have to be enormous to have an
enormous effect. The Australian election that Epstein and Robertson used in
their experiments came down to a margin of less than 1 percent. Half the
presidential elections in US history came down to a margin of less than 8
percent. And presidential elections are really 50 separate state-by-state knife
fights, with the focus of campaigns not on poll-tested winners or losers but
purple “swing states” with razor-thin margins.
So even at an order of magnitude smaller than the
experimental effect, VMP could have serious consequences. “Four to 8 percent
would get any campaign manager excited,” says Brian Keegan, a computational
social scientist at Harvard Business School. “At the end of the day, the fact
is that in a lot of races it only takes a swing of 3 or 4 percent. If the
search engine is one or two percent, that’s still really persuasive.”
The Rise of the Machines
It’d be easy to go all 1970s-political-thriller on this
research, to assume that presidential campaigns, with their ever-increasing
level of technological sophistication, might be able to search-engine-optimize
their way to victory. But that’s probably not true. “It would cost a lot of
money,” says David Shor, a data scientist at Civis Analytics, a Chicago-based
consultancy that grew out of the first Obama campaign’s technology group.
“Trying to get the media to present something that is favorable to you is a
more favorable strategy.”
That’s called, in the parlance of political hackery,
“free media,” and, yes, voters like it. “I think that generally people don’t
trust campaigns because they tend to have a low opinion of politicians,” Shor
says. “They are more receptive to information from institutions for which they
have more respect.” Plus, in the presidential campaign high season, whoever the
Republican and Democratic nominees are will already have high page ranks
because they’ll have a huge number of inbound links, one of Google’s key
metrics.
Search and social media companies can certainly have a
new kind of influence, though. During the 2010 US congressional elections,
researchers at Facebook exposed 61 million users to a message exhorting them to
vote—it didn’t matter for whom—and found they were able to generate 340,000
extra votes across the board.
But what if—as Harvard Law professor Jonathan Zittrain
has proposed—Facebook didn’t push the “vote” message to a random 61 million
users? Instead, using the extensive information the social network maintains on
all its subscribers, it could hypothetically push specific messaging to
supporters or foes of specific legislation or candidates. Facebook could flip
an election; Zittrain calls this “digital gerrymandering.” And if you think
that companies like the social media giants would never do such a thing,
consider the way that Google mobilized its users against the Secure Online
Privacy Act and PROTECT IP Act, or “SOPA-PIPA.”
In their paper, Epstein and Robertson equate digital
gerrymandering to what a political operative might call GOTV—Get Out the Vote,
the mobilization of activated supporters. It’s a standard campaign move when
your base agrees with your positions but isn’t highly motivated—because they
feel disenfranchised, let’s say, or have problems getting to polling places.
What they call the “search engine manipulation effect,” though, works on undecided
voters, swing voters. It’s a method of persuasion.
Again, though, it doesn’t require a conspiracy. It’s
possible that, as Epstein says, “if executives at Google had decided to study
the things we’re studying, they could easily have been flipping elections to
their liking with no one having any idea.” But simultaneously more likely and
more science-fiction-y is the possibility that this—oh, let’s call it
“googlemandering,” why don’t we?—is happening without any human intervention at
all. “These numbers are so large that Google executives are irrelevant to the
issue,” Epstein says. “If Google’s search algorithm, just through what they
call ‘organic processes,’ ends up favoring one candidate over another, that’s
enough. In a country like India, that could send millions of votes to one
candidate.”
As you’d expect, Google doesn’t think it’s likely their
algorithm is stealing elections. “Providing relevant answers has been the
cornerstone of Google’s approach to search from the very beginning. It would
undermine people’s trust in our results and company if we were to change
course,” says a Google spokesperson, who would only comment on condition of
anonymity. In short, the algorithms Google uses to rank search results are
complicated, ever-changing, and bigger than any one person. A regulatory action
that, let’s say, forced Google to change the first search result in a list on a
given candidate would break the very thing that makes Google great: giving
right answers very quickly all the time. (Plus, it might violate the First
Amendment.)
The thing is, though, even though it’s tempting to think
of algorithms as the very definition of objective, they’re not. “It’s not
really possible to have a completely neutral algorithm,” says Jonathan Bright,
a research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute who studies elections. “I
don’t think there’s anyone in Google or Facebook or anywhere else who’s trying
to tweak an election. But it’s something these organizations have always
struggled with.” Algorithms reflect the values and worldview of the
programmers. That’s what an algorithm is, fundamentally. “Do they want to make
a good effort to make sure they influence evenly across Democrats and
Republicans? Or do they just let the algorithm take its course?” Bright asks.
That course might be scary, if Epstein is right. Add the
possibility of search rank influence to the individualization Google can
already do based on your gmail, google docs, and every other way you’ve let the
company hook into you…combine that with the feedback loop of popular things
getting more inbound links and so getting higher search ranking…and the impact
stretches way beyond politics. “You can push knowledge, beliefs, attitudes, and
behavior among people who are vulnerable any way you want using search
rankings,” Epstein says. “Now that we’ve discovered this big effect, how do you
kill it?”
Comments
Post a Comment