"Google and Facebook have the power to undermine democracy with no one knowing it has been undermined. " - Caused Shift of 3 Million more votes to Hillary in 2016
New Movie Claims Google Handed the Popular Vote to
Hillary Clinton in 2016
BY TYLER O'NEIL SEPTEMBER 23, 2018
When Donald Trump surprised the world by winning the 2016
election, liberals clung to the idea that his victory was illegitimate because
Hillary Clinton won the popular vote. According to a psychologist who supported
Clinton in 2016, however, Google's bias in Clinton's favor may remove even that
symbolic victory from her.
Almost all of Clinton's popular vote margin could be
attributed to Google bias, making her win "negligible." Dr. Robert
Epstein, a psychologist who earned his Ph.D. at Harvard, actually reported this
finding last year, but he explains how it works in the upcoming film "The
Creepy Line."
Epstein made a stir in 2015 by reporting in Politico that
Google could "rig" the 2016 election. This story discussed the
results of his study, which was published in the Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences (PNAS). That study found that "biased search ranking
can easily shift the voting preferences of undecided voters from 20% or more —
up to 80% in some demographic groups."
In a white paper published by the American Institute for
Behavioral Research and Technology in June 2017, Epstein followed up on this
PNAS study, suggesting that Clinton's popular vote margin was almost entirely
attributable to pro-Clinton bias at Google.
"Extrapolating from the mathematics introduced in
this report ... the lead author of the PNAS study [Epstein himself] predicted
that a pro-Clinton bias in Google's search results would, over time, shift at
least 2.6 million votes to Clinton. She won the popular vote in the November
election by 2,864,974 votes," Epstein wrote with his co-author Ronald E.
Robertson.
"Without the pro-Clinton bias in Google's search
results, her win margin in the popular vote would have been negligible,"
Epstein wrote.
On Friday, the psychologist confirmed to PJ Media that
this stunning result has not been previously reported. PJ Media learned of the
study in a screening for "The Creepy Line" on Wednesday night.
"It's actually at the end of the paper I released
months ago, quite a while ago," Epstein told PJ Media on Friday.
"From my perspective, it's pretty straightforward.
It's just math," the psychologist said. He noted that "the math in
the 2015 PNAS paper is pretty solid. There's even a table in there that allows
you to figure out whether or not you can use search rankings to flip an
election based on the projected win margin."
During the interview, Epstein lamented Trump's win and
his presidency, but he insisted that Google's power is a much more important
and terrifying issue.
"This is not a problem for conservatives. This is a
problem for humanity," the psychologist told PJ Media. "Who gave a
handful of executives in Silicon Valley the right to decide what billions of
people around the world can see and cannot see? Who gave them that power?"
In "The Creepy Line," New York Times
bestselling author Peter Schweizer argued that "we did. We all did,"
by signing the user agreements. Epstein disagreed with that idea.
"I don't believe that meeting ever took place. I
don't think there was ever a vote on that issue for that matter," he told
PJ Media.
Epstein has long studied the impact of search engines
like Google, and their ability to sway opinion. He has proven that search
engine manipulation effect (SEME) can impact how people see the world — and how
they see political figures specifically.
SEME works in a few ways. When you type a word into a
Google search, Google will present various suggestions for a search. Epstein's
research has found that if all the suggestions are positive, people are more
likely to see positive websites for that person or issue. But if there is one
negative suggestion included under that search bar, the negative result is
likely to get ten to fifteen times more clicks.
Similarly, Google presents ten search results per page,
and the very first search result is considered the most reliable. For questions
like, "What is the capital of France?" the correct answer,
"Paris," comes to the top. But on issues of opinion — and especially
when researching political candidates — the search results and their ranking
can have tremendous thorny implications.
As Epstein says in "The Creepy Line,"
"Google and Facebook have the power to undermine democracy with no one
knowing it has been undermined. If they exercise these powers, democracy is an
illusion."
"We found systematic bias in favor of one candidate,
Hillary Clinton," he says in the film. They found the bias "in all
ten search positions on the first page. If you took away this bias, it is
possible the popular vote would have been even."
According to Epstein's research, Google's search results
favored Hillary Clinton, and SEME can sway 20 percent of voters — and 80
percent, in certain demographic groups. He himself — again, a Clinton supporter
in 2016 — suggested that the bias swayed 2.6 million votes, on the low end.
With liberals still convinced Clinton should have won the
election, these results are extremely important to report. Some corners of the
Internet are already claiming that if Clinton and Trump had a do-over today,
the Democrat would prevail. Some of the vitriol might subside if liberals
understood the implications of Epstein's work, and realized that Trump's appeal
may have been even stronger — given that Google may have put its tremendous
thumb on the scale.
Google Exec Boasted About Helping Hillary Clinton by
Boosting Latino Turnout in 2016
Earlier this month, Tucker Carlson unveiled an email from
a Google executive bragging about helping to increase the Latino vote, assuming
that Latinos would heavily favor Clinton. Shortly after that, the Daily Caller
released a video of Google executives lamenting Trump's victory. On Thursday,
the Wall Street Journal's John D. McKinnon and Douglas MacMillan reported that
Google employees schemed about how to tweak the search function to harm Trump's
travel ban.
Liberals may like the idea that Google helped Hillary
Clinton, but even they should be afraid of the kind of suggestive power that
Google has, Epstein said.
"We all need to rise above our political biases and
understand there's a much larger problem here."
Indeed, Schweizer told PJ Media Thursday that Benito
Mussolini, Vladimir Lenin, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Mao Zedong
"would dream about" the kind of "control or influence" that
Facebook and Google have over billions of people.
"The Creepy Line" reveals just how much power
Google and Facebook have. Epstein is working to set up a monitoring system to
alert people to exactly what these companies are doing in real time. You can
request a screening of the film at this link. Watch the trailer below.
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