With its biased algorithms, is Google seeking to influence the outcome of the midterm elections in 2022?

Robert Epstein claims to have proof that the answer is “yes”

Epstein, who holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University, has an impressive background. Former editor-in-chief of Psychology Today, author of fifteen books, and senior research psychologist at the American Institute of Behavioral Research and Technology.

In the weeks leading up to the midterm elections, Epstein and a team of hundreds monitored the political information promoted by digital corporations such as Google and Twitter. On Sunday, Epstein disclosed his findings in a piece for the Daily Caller.

Epstein’s team has identified 1.9 million “ephemeral experiences” that Google put into users’ feeds in an attempt to influence their voting behavior – likely Democratic, given the company’s history of prejudice. Epstein anticipates that 2.5 million of these communications will have been logged by election day.

Epstein defines ephemeral material as “short-lived content that impacts people and then disappears, leaving no trace.”

Through its search engine, the Google-owned video network YouTube, and other channels, Google pushes messages intended to affect voters in a biased manner, which then vanish. Or, it would have vanished without a trace had Epstein not assembled a team of “field agents” — registered voters — to record these messages on more than 2,500 laptops.

Epstein has found over a dozen distinct sorts of “ephemeral experiences” intended to affect opinion over the span of nearly a decade. This includes bias in search results, search recommendations, voting reminders, and digital personal assistant interactions.

For instance, while searching for the candidate of one political party, only favorable articles, videos, and other results are prioritized. In addition, Google’s search bar displays what Epstein calls “well constructed search recommendations” when a user begins to type a phrase.

According to Epstein, these communications “can shift voting preferences of undecided voters by up to 80 percent in some demographic groups after a single search.”

Reminders to vote were sent more often to liberal voters than to conservatives, and question-and-answer interactions with digital personal assistants manage to “shift the voting preferences of undecided voters” by 40 percent or more, Epstein’s team found.

Prior to the 2020 election, the psychologist’s team gathered and documented 1.5 million ephemeral encounters of this sort. They think that these operations moved up to six million votes in Joe Biden’s favor.

In 2022, his team found similar results.

“In swing states, and especially in Wisconsin, Arizona and Florida, we are finding a high level of liberal bias in Google search results, but not in search results on Bing (the same pattern we have found in every election since 2016),” Epstein wrote.

More on this story via The Western Journal:

“In several swing states, 92 percent of the autoplay videos being fed to YouTube users are coming from liberal news sources (YouTube is owned by Google). Unless Google backs down, it will shift hundreds of thousands of votes on Election Day itself with those brazen targeted go-vote reminders — and we will catch them doing so.” CONTINUE READING…