How Google Stopped the Red Wave
... Two days before the 2022 midterm elections, I published an article explaining how Google and other tech companies were shifting millions of votes without people knowing, and I also explained how I knew, without doubt, that this was occurring....
Over a period of months, Google potentially nudged undecided voters toward voting blue by showing people politically biased content in their search engine, suppressing content they didn’t want people to see, recommending left-leaning videos on YouTube (pdf) (which Google owns), allegedly sending tens of millions of emails to people’s spam boxes, and sending go-vote reminders on their home page mainly to liberal and moderate voters.
These manipulations (and others) don’t affect voters with strong points of view, but they can have an enormous impact on voters who are undecided (pdf)—the people who decide the outcomes of close elections....
In particular, we were tracking what Google employees call “ephemeral experiences”—content that appears briefly, affects people, and then disappears. In 2018, in emails that leaked from the company, Googlers were discussing how they might use ephemeral experiences to change people’s views about Trump’s travel ban....
In particular, we were tracking what Google employees call “ephemeral experiences”—content that appears briefly, affects people, and then disappears. In 2018, in emails that leaked from the company, Googlers were discussing how they might use ephemeral experiences to change people’s views about Trump’s travel ban....
Although we were unable to stop the manipulations in 2022, the good news is that we were able to preserve a treasure trove of incriminating evidence—those 2.5 million politically related ephemeral experiences. In 2023, this large dataset might be used by authorities to go after Big Tech. This will almost certainly occur if Republicans control the House....
Related
Google Is Shifting Votes On A Massive Scale, But A Solution Is At Hand, by Robert Epstein, Daily Caller, 6 November 2022.
... I’ve so far identified about a dozen new forms of online manipulation that make use of ephemeral experiences, and nearly all these techniques are controlled exclusively by Google and, to a lesser extent, other tech companies. ...
These new forms of influence are stunning in their impact. Search results that favor one candidate (in other words, that lead people who click on high-ranking results to web pages that glorify that candidate) can shift the voting preferences of undecided voters by up to 80 percent in some demographic groups after a single search. Carefully crafted search suggestions that flash at you while you are typing a search term can turn a 50/50 split among undecided voters into a 90/10 split with no one knowing they have been manipulated. A single question-and-answer interaction on a digital personal assistant can shift the voting preferences of undecided voters by more than 40 percent....
Whatever Mr. Pichai, its CEO, decides to do, we will know, and we will preserve the evidence....
By late 2023, we will have a digital shield in place – a panel of more than 20,000 field agents in all 50 states – and we will shame Big Tech into staying clear of our elections and our kids for many years to come.