A new report makes the claim that major technological corporations have the unchecked ability to influence American elections based on extensive study of algorithms’ effects on human behavior.
Robert Epstein, the author of the report, claims, “Big Tech companies are deliberately manipulating the outcomes of our elections and the thinking and beliefs of our children. And they are having an enormous impact,” according to the Gatestone Institution International Policy Council.
Epstein was previously the editor-in-chief of Psychology Today and a contributing editor for Scientific American. He is now the senior research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology.
“The techniques we have discovered — the Search Engine Manipulation Effect, the Answer Bot Effect, the Targeted Messaging Effect, and others — can easily shift the opinions and voting preferences of undecided voters by between 20% and 80% after just one manipulation,” Epstein explained.
Epstein also pointed to an April 2022 study conducted by that group which “found substantial political bias in Google search results and in YouTube’s ‘up-next’ algorithm, sufficient to have shifted more than six million votes in the 2020 Presidential election.”
The study was conducted in Arizona, Georgia, Florida, and North Carolina and identified that “liberal” users received targeted voting reminders while “conservative” voters did not.
The results, which were shared with government leaders immediately after collection of the data in 2020, prompted Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX), Ron Johnson (R-WI), and Mike Lee (R-UT) to send a letter in November 2020 to Google CEO Sundar Pichai suggesting that the results contradicted his sworn testimony to the House Committee on the Judiciary.
Pichai had claimed in testimony before Congress in 2018 that Google “won’t do any work, you know, to politically tilt anything one way or the other. It’s against our core values.”
The results of Epstein’s research led the senators to suggest this testimony was “not true.”
“Big Tech presents a grave threat to free speech in America and to the integrity of our elections. Google has more power than any company on the face of the planet, and Dr. Epstein’s findings raise serious concerns about Google’s abuse of that power and its willingness to manipulate its platform to help Joe Biden win the presidency,” Sen. Cruz said in a press release at the time.
Concerns about the influence of large corporations over elections continue today as the House Judiciary Committee heard testimony this month concerning the way Big Tech companies allegedly worked with government agencies to censor reporting in the lead-up to the 2020 election.
Emma-Jo Morris, a former New York Post reporter who broke the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop, described the alleged effort to kill the reporting by “the unholy alliance between the Intelligence Community, social media platforms, and legacy media outlets.”
“What this relationship between U.S. government officials and American corporations represents is an unprecedented push to undermine the First Amendment — the right to think, write, read, and say whatever we want,” she warned.
At the same hearing, Rep. Kweisi Mfume (D-MD) denounced the allegations of conspiratorial censorship, framing them as undermining trust in federal agencies.
“Here’s what galls me,” Mfume explained. “I don’t like these attacks on the Department of Justice, the FBI, the IRS as if they are somehow anti-U.S. agencies.”
“Those agencies keep this democracy in check. It keeps them in float. They provide the checks and they provide the balances,” he claimed.