![\"\"](\"http:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/03\/482n69phse731.jpg\")
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By Joseph Mercola
\nMercola.com<\/p>\n
Robert Epstein, who received his Ph.D. in psychology from Harvard in 1981 and served as the former editor in chief at Psychology Today, is now a senior research psychologist for the American Institute of Behavioral Research and Technology, where for the last decade he has helped expose\u00a0Google\u2019s manipulative and deceptive practices<\/a>. He explains what got him interested in investigating the\u00a0internet search monopoly<\/a>\u00a0in the first place:<\/p>\n \u201cIn 2012, January 1st, I received some emails from Google saying my website contained malware and that they were somehow blocking access. This means I had gotten onto one of Google\u2019s blacklists.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n My website did contain some malware. It was pretty easy to get rid of, but it turns out it\u2019s hard to get off of a Google blacklist. That\u2019s a big problem. I started looking at Google just a little bit differently.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n I wondered, first of all, why they were notifying me about this rather than some government agency or some nonprofit organization? Why was a private company notifying me?<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n In other words, who made Google sheriff of the internet? Second, I learned they had no customer service department, which seemed very strange, so if you have a problem with Google, then you have a problem because they don\u2019t help you solve the problem.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n I learned also that although you can get onto a blacklist in a split second, it can take weeks to get off a blacklist. There have been businesses that have gotten onto their blacklists and have gone out of business while they\u2019re trying to straighten out the problem.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n The thing that really caught my eye \u2014 because I\u2019ve been a programmer my whole life \u2014 was I couldn\u2019t figure out how they were blocking access to my website, not just through their own products \u2026 Google.com, the search engine, or through Chrome, which is their browser, but through Safari, which is an Apple product, through Firefox, which is a browser run by Mozilla, a nonprofit organization.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n How was Google blocking access through so many different means? The point is I just started to get more curious about the company, and later in 2012, I happened to be looking at a growing literature, which was about the power of search rankings to impact sales.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n This was in the marketing field and it just was astonishing. In other words, if you could push yourself up one more notch in their search results, that could make the difference between success or failure for your company; it could mean a lot more income.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n It turns out that this initial research was saying that people really trust those higher ranked search results. I simply asked a question. I wondered whether, if people trust those higher rank search results, I could use search results to influence people\u2019s opinions, maybe even their votes.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n What Epstein discovered through his subsequent research, which began in 2013, is that yes, biased search results can indeed be used to influence public opinion and sway undecided voters. What\u2019s more, the strength of that influence was shocking. He also eventually discovered how Google is able to block website access on browsers other than their own. His findings were published in 2016 in U.S. News & World Report.1<\/span><\/sup><\/p>\n Google\u2019s Powers Pose Serious Threats to Society<\/strong><\/p>\n Google\u2019s powers pose three specific threats to society:<\/p>\n 1.<\/span>They\u2019re a surveillance agency with significant yet hidden surveillance powers. As noted by Epstein:<\/p>\n \u201cThe search engine \u2026 Google Wallet, Google Docs, Google Drive, YouTube, these are surveillance platforms. In other words, from their perspective, the value these tools have is they give them more information about you. Surveillance is what they do.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n 2.<\/span>They\u2019re a censoring agency with the ability to restrict or block access to websites across the internet, thus deciding what people can and cannot see. They even have the ability to block access to entire countries and the internet as a whole.<\/p>\n The most crushing problem with this kind of internet censorship is that you don\u2019t know what you don\u2019t know. If a certain type of information is removed from search, and you don\u2019t know it should exist somewhere, you\u2019ll never go looking for it. And, when searching for information online, how would you know that certain websites or pages have been removed from the search results in the first place? The answer is, you don\u2019t.<\/p>\n For example, Google has been investing in DNA repositories for quite a long time, and are adding DNA information to our profiles. According to Epstein, Google has taken over the national DNA repository, but articles about that \u2014 which he has cited in his own writings \u2014 have all vanished.<\/p>\n 3.<\/span>They have the power to manipulate public opinion through search rankings and other means.<\/p>\n \u201cTo me, that\u2019s the scariest area,\u201d\u00a0<\/em>Epstein says, \u201cbecause Google is shaping the opinions, thinking, beliefs, attitudes, purchases and votes of billions of people around the world without anyone knowing that they\u2019re doing so \u2026 and perhaps even more shocking, without leaving a paper trail for authorities to trace.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n They\u2019re using new techniques of manipulation that have never existed before in human history and they are for the most part, subliminal \u2026 but they don\u2019t produce tiny shifts.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n They produce enormous shifts in people\u2019s thinking, very rapidly. Some of the techniques I\u2019ve discovered are among the largest behavioral effects ever discovered in the behavioral sciences.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n While surveillance is Google\u2019s primary business, their revenue \u2014 which exceeds $130 billion a year \u2014 comes almost exclusively from advertising. All that personal information you\u2019ve provided them through their various products is sold to advertisers looking for a specific target audience.<\/p>\n How Google Can Shift Your Perception Without Your Knowledge<\/strong><\/p>\n Epstein\u2019s controlled, randomized, double-blind and counterbalanced experiments have revealed a number of different ways in which Google can\u00a0shift public perception<\/a>. The first effect he discovered is called SEME, which stands for search engine manipulation effect. For a full description of the basic experiment used to identify this effect, please listen to the interview.<\/p>\n In summary, the aim of his experiment was to see whether search results biased toward a particular political candidate would be capable of shifting users\u2019 political opinion and leanings.<\/p>\n \u201cI had predicted, when we first did this, that we would get a shift,\u201d\u00a0<\/em>Epstein says,\u00a0\u201cbecause \u2026 people do trust higher ranked search results, and of course we had biased the search results so that, if in that first group, someone was clicking on a high-ranking search result, that would connect them to a webpage which made one candidate look much better than the other \u2026<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n I predicted we could get a shift in voting preferences of 2% to 3%. I was way off. We got \u2026 a shift of 48%, which I thought must be an error because that\u2019s crazy \u2026<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n I should note that in almost all of our experiments, especially those early ones, we deliberately used undecided voters. That\u2019s the key. You can\u2019t easily push the opinions or voting preferences of people who are partisan, who are strongly committed to one party or another, but people who are undecided, those are the people who are very vulnerable. In our experiments, we always find a way to use undecided voters.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n In these early experiments, the way we guaranteed that our voters were undecided was by using people from the U.S. as our participants, but the election we chose was the 2010 election for the prime minister of Australia.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n They\u2019re real candidates, a real election, real search results, real webpages, and of course, because our participants were from the U.S. they were not familiar with the candidates.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n In fact, that\u2019s why, before they do the search, we get this almost perfect 50\/50 split regarding who they\u2019re going to vote for, because they don\u2019t know these candidates. The information they\u2019re getting from the search, that, presumably, is why we get a shift.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Simple Trick Effectively Masks Search Bias<\/strong><\/p>\n Another thing Epstein noticed was that very few seemed to realize they were seeing biased search results. In other words, the manipulation went virtually undetected.<\/p>\n In a second experiment, they were able to achieve a 63% shift in voter preference, and by masking the bias \u2014 simply by inserting a pro-opponent result here and there \u2014 they were able to hide the bias from almost everyone.<\/p>\n \u201cIn other words, we could get enormous shifts in opinions and voting preferences with no one being able to detect the bias in the search results we were showing them,\u201d\u00a0<\/em>Epstein says.\u00a0\u201cThis is where, again, it starts to get scary. Scarier still is when we moved on to do a national study of more than 2,000 people in all 50 states.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n What this large-scale investigation revealed is that the few who actually notice the bias are not protected from its effects. Curiously, they actually shift even further toward the bias, rather than away from it.<\/p>\n As evidenced by other studies, the pattern of clicks is a key factor that makes search bias so powerful: 50% of all search selections go to the top two items and 95% of all clicks go to the first page of search results.<\/p>\n \u201cIn other words, people spend most of their time clicking on and reading content that comes from high-ranking search results. If those high-ranking search results favor one candidate, that\u2019s pretty much all they see and that impacts their opinions and their voting preferences,\u201d<\/em>\u00a0Epstein says.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Subsequent experiments revealed that this click pattern is the result of conditioning. Most of the things people search for are simple matters such as local weather or the capital of a country. The most appropriate and correct answer is always at the very top. This conditions them to assume that the best and truest answer is always the most high-ranked listing.<\/p>\n Google May Have Shifted Millions of Votes in 2016 Elections<\/strong><\/p>\n The ramifications of the search engine manipulation effect can be immense. Of course, having power to shift public opinion is one thing; actually using that power is another. So, Epstein\u2019s next target was to determine whether Google is using its power of influence or not.<\/p>\n \u201cEarly 2016, I set up the first-ever monitoring system, which allowed me to look over the shoulders of people as they were conducting election-related searches on Google, Bing and Yahoo in the months leading up to the 2016 presidential election. I had 95 field agents (as we call them), in 24 states.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n We kept their identities secret, which took a lot of work. And this is exactly, by the way, what the Nielsen company does to generate ratings for television shows. They have several thousand families. Their identities are secret. They equip the families with special boxes, which allow Nielsen to tabulate what programs they\u2019re watching \u2026<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Inspired by the Nielsen model, we recruited our field agents, we equipped them with custom passive software. In other words, no one could detect the fact that they have the software in their computers. But that software allowed us to look over their shoulders as they conducted election related searches \u2026<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n We ended up preserving 13,207 election-related searches and the nearly 100,000 webpages to which the search results linked \u2026 After the election, we rated the webpages for bias, either pro-Clinton or pro-Trump \u2026 and then we did an analysis to see whether there was any bias in the search results people were seeing.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n The results we got were crystal clear, highly significant statistically \u2026 at the 0.001 level. What that says is we can be confident the bias we were seeing was real, and it didn\u2019t occur because of some random factors. We found a pro-Clinton bias in all 10 search positions on the first page of Google search results, but not on Bing or Yahoo.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n That\u2019s very important. So, there was a significant pro-Clinton bias on Google. Because of the experiments I had been doing since 2013, I was also able to calculate how many votes could have been shifted with that level of bias\u2026 At bare minimum, about 2.6 million [undecided] votes would have shifted to Hillary Clinton.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n On the high end, Google\u2019s biased search results may have shifted as many as 10.4 million undecided voters toward Clinton, which is no small feat \u2014 all without anyone realizing they\u2019d been influenced, and without leaving a trace for the authorities to follow.<\/p>\n According to Epstein\u2019s calculations, tech companies, Google being the main one, can shift 15 million votes leading up to the 2020 election, which means they have the potential to select the next president of United States.<\/p>\n Google Has the Power to Determine 25% of Global Elections<\/strong><\/p>\n Many who look at Epstein\u2019s work end up focusing on Google\u2019s ability to influence U.S. politics, but the problem is much bigger than that.<\/p>\n \u201cAs I explained when I testified before Congress, the reason why I\u2019m speaking out about these issues is because, first of all, I \u2026 think it\u2019s important that we preserve democracy and preserve the free and fair election. To me, it\u2019s pretty straight forward.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n But the problem is much bigger than elections or democracy or the United States. Because I calculated back in 2015 that \u2026 Google\u2019s search engine \u2014 because more than 90% of searches worldwide are conducted on Google \u2014 was determining the outcomes of upwards of 25% of the national elections in the world.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n How can that be? Well, it\u2019s because a lot of elections are very close. And that\u2019s the key to understanding this. In other words, we actually looked at the win margins in national elections around the world, which tend to be very close. In that 2010 Australian election, for example, the win margin was something like 0.2% \u2026<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n If the results they\u2019re getting on Google are biased toward one candidate, that shifts a lot of votes among undecided people. And it\u2019s very, very simple for them to flip an election or \u2026 rig an election \u2026 It\u2019s very, very simple for Google to do that.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n They can do it deliberately, which is kind of scary. In other words, some top executives at Google could decide who they want to win an election in South Africa or the U.K. or anywhere. It could be just a rogue employee at Google who does it. You may think that\u2019s impossible \u2026 [but] it\u2019s incredibly simple \u2026<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n [A] senior software engineer at Google, Shumeet Baluja, who\u2019s been at Google almost since the very beginning, published a novel that no one\u2019s ever heard of called \u2018The Silicon Jungle\u2019 \u2026 It\u2019s fictional, but it\u2019s about Google, and the power that individual employees at Google have to make or break any company or any individual.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n It\u2019s a fantastic novel. I asked Baluja how Google let him get away with publishing it and he said, \u2018Well, they made me promise I would never promote it.\u2019 That\u2019s why no one\u2019s ever heard of this book.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n A Dictator Unlike Anything the World Has Ever Known<\/strong><\/p>\n Another, and even more frightening possibility, is that Google could allow its biased algorithm to favor one candidate over another without caring about which candidate is being favored.<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s the scariest possibility,\u201d\u00a0<\/em>Epstein says, \u201cbecause now you\u2019ve got an algorithm, a computer program, which is an idiot \u2026 deciding who rules us. It\u2019s crazy.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n While this sounds like it should be illegal, it\u2019s not, because there are no laws or regulations that restrict or dictate how Google must rank its search results. Courts have actually concluded that Google is simply exercising its right to free speech, even if that means destroying the businesses they demote in their search listings or black listings. The only way to protect ourselves from this kind of hidden influence is by setting up monitoring programs such as Epstein\u2019s all over the world. \u201cAs a species, it\u2019s the only way we can protect ourselves from new types of online technologies that can be used to influence us,\u201d he says. \u201cNo dictator anywhere has ever had even a tiny fraction of the power that this company has.\u201d<\/p>\n Epstein is also pushing for government to make the Google search index a public commons, which would allow other companies to create competing search platforms using Google\u2019s database. While Google\u2019s search engine cannot be broken up, its monopoly would be thwarted by forcing it to hand over its index to other search platform developers.<\/p>\n The Influence of Search Suggestions<\/strong><\/p>\n In 2016, Epstein also discovered the remarkable influence of search suggestions \u2014 the suggested searches shown in a drop-down menu when you begin to type a search term. This effect is now known as the search suggestion effect or SSE. Epstein explains:<\/p>\n \u201cInitially the idea was they were going to save you time. That\u2019s the way they presented this new feature. They were going to anticipate, based on your history, or based on what other people are searching for, what it is you\u2019re looking for so you don\u2019t have to type the whole thing. Just click on one of the suggestions. But then it changed into something else. It changed into a tool for manipulation.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n In June 2016, a small news organization \u2026 discovered that it was virtually impossible to get negative search suggestions related to Hillary Clinton, but easy to get them for other people including Donald Trump. They were very concerned about this because maybe that could influence people somehow.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n So, I tried this myself, and I have a wonderful image that I preserved showing this. I typed in \u2018Hillary Clinton is\u2019 on Bing and on Yahoo, and I got those long lists, eight and 10 items, saying, \u2018Hillary Clinton is the devil. Hillary Clinton is sick\u2019 \u2026 all negative things that people were actually searching for.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n How do I know that? Because we checked Google trends. Google trends shows you what people are actually searching for. Sure enough, people were actually searching for all these negative things related to Hillary Clinton. Those [were] the most popular search terms.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n So, we tried it on Google and we got, \u2018Hillary Clinton is winning, Hillary Clinton is awesome.\u2019 Now you check those phrases on Google trends and you find no one is searching for \u2018Hillary Clinton is awesome.\u2019 Nobody. Not one. But that\u2019s what they\u2019re showing you in their search suggestions.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n That again got my research gears running. I started doing experiments because I said, \u2018Wait a minute, why would they do this? What is the point?\u2019<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Here\u2019s what I found in a series of experiments: Just by manipulating search suggestions, I could turn a 50\/50 split among undecided voters into a 90\/10 split \u2014 with no one having the slightest idea that they\u2019ve been manipulated.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n YouTube\u2019s Up Next Algorithm<\/strong><\/p>\n YouTube, which is owned by Google, also has enormous influence on public opinion. According to Epstein, 70% of the videos people view on YouTube are suggested by Google\u2019s top secret Up Next algorithm, which recommends videos for you to view whenever you\u2019re watching a video.<\/p>\n Just like the search suggestions, this is a phenomenally effective ephemeral manipulation tool. There\u2019s no record of the videos recommended by the algorithm, yet it can take you down the proverbial rabbit hole by feeding you one video after another.<\/p>\n \u201cThere are documented cases now in which people have been converted to extreme Islam or to white supremacy, literally because they\u2019d been pulled down a rabbit hole by a sequence of videos on YouTube,\u201d<\/em>\u00a0Epstein says.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n \u201cThink of that power. Again, it\u2019s not powerful for people who already have strong opinions. It\u2019s powerful for the people who don\u2019t, the people who are vulnerable, the people who are undecided or uncommitted. And that\u2019s a lot of people.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n The Creepy Line<\/strong><\/p>\n Most people now have Amazon Prime. If you are one of those who do, you can watch the following documentary for free on Prime. It is well worth your time to do so. Epstein and many other experts provide a very compelling overview of the dangers that we discuss in our interview. In my view, this is a must-watch and one to recommend to your friends and family.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/m.media-amazon.com\/images\/I\/41kfjOojA9L.jpg\")
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