https://www.theepochtimes.com/robert-eps...7681.html/
"Tech giants have “a whole class of techniques” exclusively at their disposal “for shifting people’s opinions, thinking, attitudes, beliefs, purchases, and votes without people knowing, and without leaving a paper trail,” Robert Epstein said in an interview with The Epoch Times for the “American Thought Leaders” program.
Epstein, a senior research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology and former editor-in-chief of Psychology Today, has devoted the past 6 1/2 years to researching tech giant bias, especially with Google, which dominates the search engine market.
“Americans see Google search results about 500 million times a day. Google controls roughly 90 percent of search. The next largest search engine, Bing, controls about 2 percent of search,” Epstein said.
Epstein’s peer-reviewed research found that research participants were remarkably susceptible to bias: search engine bias could easily shift 20 percent or more of the votes of undecided voters in an election. He also found that while results on Google leaned left substantially, results on Bing and Yahoo did not....
Another easy way to influence voters is by targeted messaging, such as sending out “go vote” reminders only to people with certain political biases. Based on Epstein’s calculations using Facebook’s published data in 2012, Hillary Clinton would have received 450,000 more votes on election day in 2016 if Facebook had sent a “go vote” reminder just to left-leaning users.
And notably, Google, even if it sent a reminder to everyone, both liberal and conservative—as it did by changing its homepage logo in 2018—that would give Democrats upwards of 800,000 more votes than it would have given Republicans, simply because Google has more left-leaning than right-leaning users, according to Epstein....
In early 2018, a leak to The Wall Street Journal included one email from a Google employee that mentioned using “ephemeral experiences” to counter Trump’s immigration policy.
“What’s an ephemeral experience? That means you type in something, let’s say a search term. And some results are generated on the fly just for you. They impact you, they disappear; they’re gone. And they’re not stored anywhere. And you can’t go back in time and find them,” Epstein said.
“This is a fantastic way to manipulate people,” because it leaves no paper trail to follow, and people rarely spot the bias, he said.
“And here’s something creepy. The very, very small number of people who can spot the bias, they shift even farther in the direction of the bias.
“Most of these types of influence have never existed before in human history. They’re made possible by the Internet. They’re made possible by these huge tech monopolies, and they’re entirely in the hands of these tech monopolies.
“In elections, we’re influenced by billboards, by radio shows, and TV shows, and advertisements, and so on. All of that is competitive. And in that sense, it’s probably a good thing. It’s a good thing for democracy that there is so much competition out there vying for your attention and trying to convince you of this or that. But if there’s bias in search results, that’s controlled by the platform, in this case, Google. That’s not competitive.”
Even if you found and could measure such bias, “you cannot counteract it,” he said...."
"...In the analysis, “we found substantial bias favoring Hillary Clinton in all 10 search positions on the first page of search results on Google, but not Bing or Yahoo,” he said, adding that the probability that the bias was solely due to chance was less than 1 in 1000.
Through a series of calculations, Epstein concluded that if this level of bias was present nationwide, it would’ve shifted somewhere between 2.6 million and 10.4 million votes to Clinton.
Epstein describes himself as a moderate who leans liberal. And he had been a longtime supporter of the Clintons. “But I felt very strongly that since our results were so clear that I had a responsibility to report the findings,” he said.
Clinton won the popular vote by more than 2.8 million votes, but the popular vote “might have been very different,” Epstein said, if there had been no bias in Google’s search results.
“It was uncomfortable for me to have to acknowledge that, to have to announce that. But that’s what I concluded from the research....""
