'Something That’s Frightening': Robert Epstein Warns Against Big Tech Manipulation
'Something That’s Frightening': Robert Epstein Warns Against Big Tech Manipulation
Authored by Masooma Haq and Jan Jekielek via The Epoch
Times, April 12, 2022
A senior research psychologist at the American Institute for
Behavioral Research and Technology, in California, Robert Epstein has been
researching and looking at how the biggest tech companies influence human
behavior, and conducting extensive monitoring projects of bias in these
companies’ products, with a particular focus on Google.
Epstein called his findings “frightening” because of the tech companies’ ability to manipulate and change people’s behavior on a global scale.
“Now, put that all together, you’ve got something that’s
frightening, because you have sources of influence, controlled by really a
handful of executives who are not accountable to any public, not the American
public, not any public anywhere. They’re only accountable to their
shareholders,” Epstein
told “American
Thought Leaders” host Jan Jekielek during a recent interview.
“And yet, they hold in their hands, the power to change thinking
behavior on a massive scale, the power in close elections anyway, to pick the
winner in the country after country after country.”
Epstein said that Google’s search engine shifted between 2.6
million and 10.4 million votes to Hillary Clinton, over a period of months
before the 2016 election, and later shifted at least 6 million votes to Joe
Biden and other Democrats.
“We calculated at one point that as of 2015, upwards of 25
percent of the national elections in the world were being controlled, being
determined, by Google’s search algorithm,” he said.
Epstein is making these comments after conducting rigorous
studies, spanning almost a decade, and managing to document ephemeral
experiences of manipulation on Google and
other companies’ platforms.
He
said ephemeral experiences are the ideal form of manipulation because they are
not recorded and hard to document, like a flashing newsfeed, a search result,
or a suggested video.
“They affect us, they disappear, they’re stored nowhere, and
they’re gone,” said Epstein. “People have no idea they’re being manipulated,
number one, and number two, authorities can’t go back in time to see what
people were being shown, in other words, how they were being manipulated.”
One of his team’s recent experiments includes randomly assigning
people to groups with search results favoring candidate A in one group and
favoring candidate B in the other. The idea was to shift the participants’
voting preference, which Epstein thought would be for about 3 percent of the
participants.
“Very first experiment we ever ran on this, we shifted voting
preferences by more than 40 percent. So, I thought that’s impossible, that
can’t be repeated. The experiment with another group got a shift of more than
60 percent. So, I realized, wait a minute, maybe I’ve stumbled on
something here.”
These findings are the greatest discovery in the behavioral and
social sciences in over 100 years, according to Epstein.
Layers of Biases
He said there are two layers on which people can be manipulated,
one is the programmer creating the algorithm to influence results, to
ultimately increase the company’s revenue, and then there is the neglect of the
algorithms, where they are created and left unchecked.
“Or could be maybe they’re just not paying attention. In fact,
let’s call this as I do in a new article I have coming up, algorithmic neglect,
okay, so they’re just neglecting it.”
He said these algorithms do not give equal time to candidates or
anything else, they just push one item to the top list. “So, if computer
programs are determining who runs the world, who runs many countries around the
world, that can’t be good for humanity. They’re just not smart enough to make good
decisions for us.”
Epstein said the programmers creating the algorithms have
biases, so therefore the algorithm has a preference. “Now, 96 percent, of
donations from Google, and other tech companies in Silicon Valley, go to one
political party, it happens to be the party I like, which is the Democratic
Party. But the point is, there’s a lot of political bias in these companies.”
Dan
Gainor of the Media Research Center confirmed this fact. “From
the top to the bottom, these companies are overwhelmingly liberal,
overwhelmingly pro-Democrat,” Gainor
told Fox News. “At the top, they contribute to Democrat causes. At
the bottom, they contribute to Democrat causes in overwhelming numbers.”
Likewise, Twitter employee donations during the last federal
election cycle, according to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics
show at least 89 percent of
their donations went to democrats.
Other Significant Experiment
The strongest effect Epstein was able to create was called OME
(opinion matching effect).
As an example, he said that companies like Facebook, Tinder,
etc. may have a campaign to “help” users decide who is the better candidate.
The company can put up surveys that ask what the person thinks about certain
issues and after the survey, the program will tell the user which candidate
matches their opinions or preferences.
Epstein said they have found that when they, in experiments,
give people a quiz, and then they tell them how good a match they are for one
candidate or another, “All the numbers shift in the direction of whichever
candidate, we said, You match. They all shift. And the shifts we get are
between 70 and 90 percent.” The most critical part is that the
experimenter does not look at the participant’s answers when they tell them who
they match.
“So, opinion matching is a fantastic way to manipulate people,
because you can shift people very, very, very dramatically and they have no
clue. They do not suspect any kind of bias or manipulation.”
Next Steps
Epstein said his next step with this work is to do this
monitoring on a larger scale so that we can get rid of the interference in our
democracy, our lives, and with our children.
“This is the solution, which is permanent, large-scale
monitoring 24 hours a day in all 50 states, doing to them what they do to us
and our kids. If we do it to them, if we monitor, we capture, we archive and we
expose, okay, then they will stay out of our lives.”
Epstein reiterated that although he is a Democrat, he is not for
this type of manipulation even though it favors the outcome he prefers.
“Now, I’m not a conservative. So, you know, I say, you know,
keep going, Yeah, absolutely. I love it. But I don’t love it. Because I don’t
want a private company that’s not accountable to the public deciding what
billions of people can see and cannot see, the problem there is you don’t know
what they don’t show,” he said.
“There are sound reasons for wanting to get these companies out
of our elections because if we don’t, it makes democracy into a kind of a joke
or at least an illusion,” he said.
“Because it means in close elections, election after election
after election, it means these companies are choosing the winner.”
His
team is primed to do this research to find out how this type of manipulation is
affecting children.
“And nobody really understands how these companies are impacting
our children, especially young children. So that’s, that’s become my latest
obsession is trying to figure that out.”
Through the monitoring, Epstein said “We’re trying to figure out
how the manipulation works. But most importantly, we’re trying to quantify it.”
And he is most interested now, in finding out how all this is impacting
children and young adults.
“Because I think that what’s really happening is that there is a
cumulative effect of, not just political bias, but a value literally a
cumulative effect of being exposed to certain kinds of values, over and over
and over again, on one tech platform, or after another. And I think that the
people who are most vulnerable to being impacted by that kind of process are
children.”
Readers can learn more about protecting personal information by
going to myprivacytips.com or
going to a website called Internet Watchdog. Epstein has also updated his
official testimony to Congress which can be found at Google’s
Triple Threat.com and my Google research.com.
His “plea” to the public is if you are in a position to donate,
please do.
“So, we’ve made a lot of progress, we need to go to the next
level, the next level means setting up a permanent, large scale,
self-sustaining monitoring system in all 50 U.S. states. This is something
which I think is required. It’s not optional. This is required for us, we must
do this to protect our country, our democracy, our children, this must be
done.”
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