We have to level this playing field. The Big Tech Giants are the ultimate data-siphons cum personalized media outlets. At least in the days of corrupt media players everyone knew what news The Guardian reported. It might be biased, but all Guardian readers got the same news. Not so with the Tech Menaces. They harvest our innermost thoughts and then nudge them “accordingly”.
Google is a publishing house not a platform, and the worst most insidious kind, yet it gets immunity the publishing houses don’t get.
Robert Epstein has 2.5 million new politically related datapoints from google searches in the US in the lead up to the 2022 election, and he exposes what an unholy PsyOp The Google Monster is. Soon he will have 20,000 voters and children collecting data on the data-collector and reporting its biases for all to see.
How Google Stopped the Red Wave
By Robert Epstein, Epoch Times
Epstein is a former editor-in-chief of Psychology Today, and a senior research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology.
Based on my team’s research, Google, and to a lesser extent, Facebook and other tech monopolies, not only took steps to shift millions of votes to Democrats in the midterms…
Over a period of months, Google 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. …
Political advertising by selective omission:
We were monitoring the politically related content that Google and other tech companies were showing to actual voters — our politically diverse panel of 2,742 “field agents,” who were located mainly in swing states.
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. They know how powerful ephemeral experiences can be. That’s one of the most closely held secrets of Google’s management.
Ephemeral content is ideal for manipulation purposes. If you get a go-vote reminder on Google’s home page (see the image below for an actual go-vote reminder sent to a liberal voter on Election Day), how would you know whether anyone else was getting it? You wouldn’t, and if you didn’t receive such a reminder, how would you know that anyone else had?
He also advises people that Google promotes some conspiracy theories to distract and divide the punters away from the real targets. While this is undoubtedly true to some extent, he pushes far too hard. Presumably he is frustrated watching people fight on so many fronts and wants them all to focus on his battle instead.
And it is a big battle.
h/t David E