Study- Google Has Power to Shift Millions of Votes Through Targeted Messaging
Posted by freedomforall 3 years, 5 months ago to Politics
Big Tech companies such Google and Facebook have enormous power to shift people’s opinions and voting preferences through manipulation of the content of their home pages that users see on screens of their devices, without people knowing, said Dr. Robert Epstein, a senior research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology in California.
“I calculated months ago, that if all the Silicon Valley companies, the most powerful two being Google and Facebook, if they’re all pushing in the same direction, that could easily shift in this election 15 million votes, which means they, in effect, decide who the next president is going to be,” Epstein said in an interview on Epoch Times’ “American Thought Leaders” program.
Epstein has conducted a large monitoring project “to determine what the big tech companies were showing people in the days leading up to the 2016, 2018, and now the 2020 election.”
The project team recruited “a diverse group of 733 registered voters, Republicans, Democrats and independents,” from “three very critical battleground states: Arizona, Florida, and North Carolina.”
Those field agents were equipped with special software that tracked their activity on the internet, “for example, doing searches on Google, Bing, and Yahoo,” Epstein explained.
The software gave the project team capability to see–with the agents’ permission—all election-related activities on the internet performed by the field agents, Epstein said, it was like seeing agents’ screens. “We are looking over their shoulders, using software,” Epstein explained.
The purpose of the monitoring was to capture ephemeral content such as search results, reminders on the Google or Facebook homepage, search suggestions, newsfeeds, YouTube sequences. This fleeting content can impact users when it appears but later it disappears forever leaving no trace, Epstein explained.
Epstein has collected and preserved more than half a million ephemeral messages on Google and Facebook home pages of his field agents that otherwise would have been lost forever.
“And we have indeed found evidence of bias and we’ve also found what some people might want to call a smoking gun,” Epstein said.
“I calculated months ago, that if all the Silicon Valley companies, the most powerful two being Google and Facebook, if they’re all pushing in the same direction, that could easily shift in this election 15 million votes, which means they, in effect, decide who the next president is going to be,” Epstein said in an interview on Epoch Times’ “American Thought Leaders” program.
Epstein has conducted a large monitoring project “to determine what the big tech companies were showing people in the days leading up to the 2016, 2018, and now the 2020 election.”
The project team recruited “a diverse group of 733 registered voters, Republicans, Democrats and independents,” from “three very critical battleground states: Arizona, Florida, and North Carolina.”
Those field agents were equipped with special software that tracked their activity on the internet, “for example, doing searches on Google, Bing, and Yahoo,” Epstein explained.
The software gave the project team capability to see–with the agents’ permission—all election-related activities on the internet performed by the field agents, Epstein said, it was like seeing agents’ screens. “We are looking over their shoulders, using software,” Epstein explained.
The purpose of the monitoring was to capture ephemeral content such as search results, reminders on the Google or Facebook homepage, search suggestions, newsfeeds, YouTube sequences. This fleeting content can impact users when it appears but later it disappears forever leaving no trace, Epstein explained.
Epstein has collected and preserved more than half a million ephemeral messages on Google and Facebook home pages of his field agents that otherwise would have been lost forever.
“And we have indeed found evidence of bias and we’ve also found what some people might want to call a smoking gun,” Epstein said.
