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STORY AT-A-GLANCE
·
Robert Epstein is a Harvard trained psychologist who has exposed
how Google is manipulating public opinion through their search engine so they
can change the results of elections and many other important areas
·
His research shows how Google is using new techniques of
manipulation that have never existed before in human history. If this weren’t
bad enough, these tools are ephemeral and leave no paper trail of their devious
behavior
·
According to Epstein’s calculations, Google can shift 15 million
votes leading up to the upcoming U.S. presidential 2020 election
·
Because Google has become and everyday tool that's used for more
than 90% of searches worldwide, the company has likely determined the outcomes
of 25% of the national elections in the world
·
Search suggestions — shown in a drop-down menu when you begin to
type a search term — is another powerful manipulation tool capable of turning a
50/50 split among undecided voters into a 90/10 split, with no one having the
slightest idea that they've been manipulated
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 Google's
manipulative and deceptive practices. He explains what got him
interested in investigating the internet search
monopoly in the first place:
"In
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's blacklists.
My
website did contain some malware. It was pretty easy to get rid of, but it
turns out it's hard to get off of a Google blacklist. That's a big problem. I
started looking at Google just a little bit differently.
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?
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't help you solve
the problem.
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're trying to
straighten out the problem.
The thing
that really caught my eye — because I've been a programmer my whole life — was
I couldn't figure out how they were blocking access to my website, not just
through their own products … 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.
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.
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.
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's opinions, maybe even their votes."
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's 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
Advertisement
Google's
Powers Pose Serious Threats to Society
Google's
powers pose three specific threats to society:
1.They're
a surveillance agency with significant yet hidden surveillance powers. As noted
by Epstein:
"The
search engine … 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."
2.They're
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.
The most
crushing problem with this kind of internet censorship is that you don't know
what you don't know. If a certain type of information is removed from search,
and you don't know it should exist somewhere, you'll 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't.
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 — which he
has cited in his own writings — have all vanished.
3.They
have the power to manipulate public opinion through search rankings and other means.
"To
me, that's the scariest area," Epstein says,
"because Google is shaping the opinions, thinking, beliefs, attitudes,
purchases and votes of billions of people around the world without anyone
knowing that they're doing so … and perhaps even more shocking, without leaving
a paper trail for authorities to trace.
They're
using new techniques of manipulation that have never existed before in human
history and they are for the most part, subliminal … but they don't produce
tiny shifts.
They
produce enormous shifts in people's thinking, very rapidly. Some of the
techniques I've discovered are among the largest behavioral effects ever
discovered in the behavioral sciences."
While
surveillance is Google's primary business, their revenue — which exceeds $130
billion a year — comes almost exclusively from advertising. All that personal
information you've provided them through their various products is sold to
advertisers looking for a specific target audience.
How
Google Can Shift Your Perception Without Your Knowledge
Epstein's
controlled, randomized, double-blind and counterbalanced experiments have
revealed a number of different ways in which Google can shift public
perception. 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.
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'
political opinion and leanings.
"I
had predicted, when we first did this, that we would get a shift," Epstein
says, "because … 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 …
I
predicted we could get a shift in voting preferences of 2% to 3%. I was way
off. We got … a shift of 48%, which I thought must be an error because that's
crazy …
I should
note that in almost all of our experiments, especially those early ones, we
deliberately used undecided voters. That's the key. You can't 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.
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.
They're
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.
In fact,
that's why, before they do the search, we get this almost perfect 50/50 split
regarding who they're going to vote for, because they don't know these
candidates. The information they're getting from the search, that, presumably,
is why we get a shift."
Simple
Trick Effectively Masks Search Bias
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.
In a
second experiment, they were able to achieve a 63% shift in voter preference,
and by masking the bias — simply by inserting a pro-opponent result here and
there — they were able to hide the bias from almost everyone.
"In
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," Epstein says. "This 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."
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.
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.
"In 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's pretty much all they see and that impacts their
opinions and their voting preferences," Epstein says.
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.
Google
May Have Shifted Millions of Votes in 2016 Elections
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's next target was to determine whether Google is
using its power of influence or not.
"Early
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.
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're watching …
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 …
We ended
up preserving 13,207 election-related searches and the nearly 100,000 webpages
to which the search results linked … After the election, we rated the webpages
for bias, either pro-Clinton or pro-Trump … and then we did an analysis to see
whether there was any bias in the search results people were seeing.
The
results we got were crystal clear, highly significant statistically … at the
0.001 level. What that says is we can be confident the bias we were seeing was
real, and it didn't 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.
That's
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… At bare
minimum, about 2.6 million [undecided] votes would have shifted to Hillary
Clinton."
On the
high end, Google's biased search results may have shifted as many as 10.4
million undecided voters toward Clinton, which is no small feat — all without
anyone realizing they'd been influenced, and without leaving a trace for the
authorities to follow.
According
to Epstein's 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.
Google
Has the Power to Determine 25% of Global Elections
Many who
look at Epstein's work end up focusing on Google's ability to influence U.S.
politics, but the problem is much bigger than that.
"As
I explained when I testified before Congress, the reason why I'm speaking out
about these issues is because, first of all, I … think it's important that we
preserve democracy and preserve the free and fair election. To me, it's pretty
straight forward.
But the
problem is much bigger than elections or democracy or the United States.
Because I calculated back in 2015 that … Google's search engine — because more
than 90% of searches worldwide are conducted on Google — was determining the
outcomes of upwards of 25% of the national elections in the world.
How can
that be? Well, it's because a lot of elections are very close. And that's 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% …
If the
results they're getting on Google are biased toward one candidate, that shifts
a lot of votes among undecided people. And it's very, very simple for them to
flip an election or … rig an election … It's very, very simple for Google to do
that.
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's impossible … [but] it's incredibly simple …
[A]
senior software engineer at Google, Shumeet Baluja, who's been at Google almost
since the very beginning, published a novel that no one's ever heard of called
'The Silicon Jungle' … It's fictional, but it's about Google, and the power
that individual employees at Google have to make or break any company or any
individual.
It's a
fantastic novel. I asked Baluja how Google let him get away with publishing it
and he said, 'Well, they made me promise I would never promote it.' That's why
no one's ever heard of this book."
A
Dictator Unlike Anything the World Has Ever Known
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.
"That's
the scariest possibility," Epstein says,
"because now you've got an algorithm, a computer program, which is an
idiot … deciding who rules us. It's crazy."
While
this sounds like it should be illegal, it's 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's all over the world. "As a species,
it's the only way we can protect ourselves from new types of online
technologies that can be used to influence us," he says. "No dictator
anywhere has ever had even a tiny fraction of the power that this company
has."
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's database. While Google's search engine cannot be broken up, its
monopoly would be thwarted by forcing it to hand over its index to other search
platform developers.
The
Influence of Search Suggestions
In 2016,
Epstein also discovered the remarkable influence of search suggestions — 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:
"Initially
the idea was they were going to save you time. That's 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're looking for so
you don't 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.
In June
2016, a small news organization … 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.
So, I
tried this myself, and I have a wonderful image that I preserved showing this.
I typed in 'Hillary Clinton is' on Bing and on Yahoo, and I got those long
lists, eight and 10 items, saying, 'Hillary Clinton is the devil. Hillary
Clinton is sick' … all negative things that people were actually searching for.
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.
So, we
tried it on Google and we got, 'Hillary Clinton is winning, Hillary Clinton is
awesome.' Now you check those phrases on Google trends and you find no one is
searching for 'Hillary Clinton is awesome.' Nobody. Not one. But that's what
they're showing you in their search suggestions.
That
again got my research gears running. I started doing experiments because I
said, 'Wait a minute, why would they do this? What is the point?'
Here's
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 — with no one having the slightest idea that they've been
manipulated."
YouTube's
Up Next Algorithm
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's top secret Up Next algorithm, which recommends videos for you to view
whenever you're watching a video.
Just like
the search suggestions, this is a phenomenally effective ephemeral manipulation
tool. There's 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.
"There
are documented cases now in which people have been converted to extreme Islam
or to white supremacy, literally because they'd been pulled down a rabbit hole
by a sequence of videos on YouTube," Epstein says.
"Think
of that power. Again, it's not powerful for people who already have strong
opinions. It's powerful for the people who don't, the people who are
vulnerable, the people who are undecided or uncommitted. And that's a lot of
people."
The
Creepy Line
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.
A
question Epstein raises is, "Who gave this private company, which is not
accountable to any of us, the ability to determine what billions of people
around the world will see or will not see?"
That is
perhaps one of the biggest issues. Epstein and others attempt to answer this
question in this documentary, "The Creepy Line,"
which is a direct quote from Google's executive chairman Eric Schmidt.
"Traditional
media have very serious constraints placed on them, but Google, which is far
more penetrating and far more effective at influencing people, has none of
these constraints," Epstein says.
"There
are lots of good people in ['The Creepy Line'], lots of good data, and it
explains my research very clearly, which is wonderful. It explains my research
better than I explain my research. 'The Creepy Line' is available on iTunes and
on Amazon. I think it costs $3 or $4 to watch … If you're an Amazon Prime
Member it's free. It's an excellent film."
Google
Runs a Total Surveillance State
In his
article2 "Seven Simple Steps Toward Online Privacy,"
Epstein outlines his recommendations for protecting your privacy while surfing
the web, most of which don't cost anything. You can access the article
at: MySevenSimpleSteps.com
"My
first sentence is 'I have not received a targeted ad on my computer or mobile
phone since 2014.' Most people are shocked by that because they're bombarded
with targeted ads constantly.
More and
more people are telling me that they're just having a conversation with
someone, so they're not even doing anything online per se, but their phone is
nearby — or they're having a conversation in their home and they have Amazon
Alexa or Google Home, these personal assistants — and the next thing they know
they start getting targeted ads related to what they were talking about.
This is
the surveillance problem … The point is that there are ways to use the internet,
tablets and mobile phones, to preserve or protect your privacy, but almost no
one does that. So, the fact is that we're now being surveilled 24/7, generally
speaking, with no awareness that we're even being surveilled.
Maybe
some people are aware that when they do searches on Google the search history
is preserved forever … But it goes so far beyond that because now we're being
surveilled through personal assistants, so that when we speak, we're being
[surveilled].
It goes
even beyond that, because a few years ago Google bought the Nest company, which
makes a smart thermostat. After they bought the company, they put microphones
into the smart thermostats, and the latest versions of the smart thermostats
have microphones and cameras.
Google
has been issued patents in recent years, which give them, basically, ownership
rights over ways of analyzing sounds that are picked up by microphones in
people's homes.
They can
hook you up with dentists, they can hook you up with sex therapists, with
mental health services, relationship coaches, et cetera. So, there's that.
Location tracking has also gotten completely out of hand. We've learned in
recent months that even when you disable location tracking … on your mobile
phone, you're still being tracked."
This is
one of the reasons I strongly recommend that you use a VPN on your cellphone
and computer, as this will prevent virtually anyone from tracking and targeting
you. There are many out there but I am using the one Epstein recommends, Nord
VPN, which is only about $3 per month and you can use it on up to six devices.
In my view, this is a must if you seek to preserve your privacy.
How
Google Tracks You Even When You're Offline
You can
learn a lot about a person by tracking their movements and whereabouts. Most of
us are very naïve about these things. As explained by Epstein, location
tracking technology has become incredibly sophisticated and aggressive.
Android
cellphones, for example, which are a Google-owned operating system, can track
you even when you're not connected to the internet, whether you have geo
tracking enabled or not.
"It
just gets creepier and creepier," Epstein says.
"Let's say you pull out your SIM card. Let's say you disconnect from your
mobile service provider, so you're absolutely isolated. You're not connected to
the internet. Guess what? Your phone is still tracking everything you do on
that phone and it's still tracking your location."
As soon
as you reconnect to the internet, all that information stored in your phone is
sent to Google. So, even though you may think you've just spent the day
incognito, the moment you reconnect, every step you've made is shared (provided
you had your phone with you).
In terms
of online tracking, it's also important to realize that Google is tracking your
movements online even if you're not using their products, because most websites
use Google Analytics, which tracks everything you do on that website. And, you
have no way of knowing whether a website uses Google Analytics or not.
Steps to
Protect Your Online Privacy
To
protect your privacy, Epstein recommends taking the following steps, seven of
which are outlined in "Seven Simple
Steps Toward Online Privacy." The last one, Fitbit, is a
more recent concern.
