The Lake County Pachyderm would like to invite the public to learn more about the ability of Google to shift millions of votes in any direction by search engine manipulation.
Please stop by to watch a compelling video. Afterwards, we will discuss what changes citizens or policymakers might want in laws or regulations in order to limit Big Tech’s influence on our modern democracy.
Refreshments and coffee will be served as usual.
Further Reading....
[WEB FX BLOG: HOW GOOGLE CAN CONTROL OPINION & FLIP ELECTIONS ]
Dr. Robert Epstein & Ronald E. Robertson tested several thousand participants in a series of experiments to see if online search results influenced opinion.
The results not only proved that Google influences public opinion — but also showed how Google does it. Epstein & Robertson coined this phenomenon the Search Engine Manipulation Effect (SEME).
In the initial experiment, Epstein & Robertson showed that search results influenced their test subjects’ opinions, and they replicated those results multiple times with different groups.
Each case showed that subjects’ political opinions changed — sometimes drastically — depending on which candidate was favored in search results about an upcoming election.
Epstein & Robertson predicted that’d happen, though. They predicted that subject opinions would change by about 2-3% for the candidate that was shown favorably in search results. Undecided or neutral voters who saw favorable results for a candidate rated their preference for that candidate about 50% higher after viewing search results.
One way that Epstein & Robertson tested undecided voters was to ask people of different nationalities about foreign elections, ensuring there would be as little bias as possible in search results. One example of this was asking Americans about Australian elections. Decided voters rated their preference for a favored candidate about 20% higher after viewing search results. To rate the preference of decided voters, Epstein & Robertson asked subjects about their preferences in elections where they would probably already have an opinion.
But even the drastic change in voter preference takes a back seat to the experiment’s most significant discovery. Between 75-100% of participants didn’t know they were looking at rigged search results.
***Epstein & Robertson carefully planned the pages of search results they showed to participants by using a mock search engine. And even with a mock search engine, almost no one realized that someone doctored the search results.***
That has some dire implications for search engines as a whole. And since Google is the most widely-used search engine in the world (by far), that means Google is incredibly powerful in terms of information control.
So powerful, in fact, that Google can potentially impact every decision we make in a day —
Google definitely knows what users hold what opinions.
If it wanted to change your opinion, it could — all it would take is a custom-made search results page.
Or if Google wanted to reach even further down the rabbit hole, they could rig whole queries with pre-determined content to make sure you only see information that reflects well on the company or public figures associated with them.
The Federal Trade Commission is one of the primary agencies in the US federal government that’s charged with protecting consumers, particularly against trusts and monopolies.
The FTC was founded in 1914 during the presidency of Woodrow Wilson. It followed several years of Theodore Roosevelt taking major trusts to court, breaking them up, and fragmenting big business with the goal of empowering the average US citizen.
Today, the FTC carries on the spirit of the 26th President — nicknamed “the Trustbuster” — but not quite in the same way.
In 2012, the FTC investigated Google for doing what we’ve been questioning this whole time — rigging search results.
The FTC found that Google was manipulating search results. Worse, they found evidence that Google’s search practices were actively harming innovation and the American consumer.
[....TO READ MORE PLEASE VISIT THE FX WEB BLOG.]
Photo Credit: Paweł Czerwiński photographer on Unsplash from Wroclaw, Poland
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