While election integrity is an important issue for people to ensure free and fair elections, he lamented how people tend to ignore Big Tech. This, Epstein added, is a big mistake.
"They've got to start looking at the Big Tech companies because it turns out that these companies, Google above all, have the ability to shift millions of votes without people knowing and without leaving a paper trail for authorities to trace," he told Seth Holehouse during the latter's "Man in America" podcast.
"That's very different than shifting a few hundred votes or a few thousands votes here and there because of ballot harvesting, ballot stuffing or whatever the terms are. This is happening on a much, much larger scale." (Related: ELECTION INTERFERENCE: Google can MANIPULATE swing voters to vote for candidates it supports, reveals Dr. Robert Epstein.)
Epstein cited his more than 11 years of rigorous and controlled research into Big Tech to back up his claims. These include controlled experiments that showed the power tech giants have in shifting opinions and votes. One such technique Epstein shared to Holehouse is called search engine manipulation effect (SEME).
Using this technique, people are assigned at random to three different groups. It turns out that people trust high-ranking results in search engines and tend to click on these results.
"We learn what's at the top is best, what's at the top is truest," Epstein told Holehouse. According to the former editor of Psychology Today magazine, controlling the ordering of search results – the practice SEME takes its name from – could result in a shift in people's thinking.
By manipulating search results, Epstein and his research team could get shifts in voting preferences of two of three percent. He told Holehouse that the first experiment they did on "undecided" voters in the election showed a shift of 43 percent. A repeat of this experiment with another group of representative voters showed a shift of 66 percent.
People can't see the bias in search results
Epstein noted that his research team also learned in their early experiments that people can't see the bias in search results.
"People can't see if there's bias, even extreme bias, in search results. So now we're talking about a technique of influence, of manipulation that's new, that's made possible by the internet, that's made possible by the invention of search engines," Epstein said.
"People are unaware when this happens when those shifts occur. They're unaware that they're being influenced. That makes them very, very dangerous."
While his endeavor began with the discovery of SEME, it didn't stop there as his research group discovered about a dozen similar techniques – such as the search suggestion effect and targeted messaging effect. Based on their experiments, the more times these manipulation techniques are done, the more people shift. Epstein added that a company like Google could be hitting people with the same kind of technique and bias for weeks or months before an election with similarly biased content.
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Watch the full interview between Seth Holehouse and Dr. Robert Epstein on the "Man in America" podcast below.
This video is from the Man in America channel on Brighteon.com.
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