Does Google influence elections with its ordering of search results?

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Does Google influence elections with its ordering of search results?

Silver2195: Apr 4, 2012

I came across this rather disturbing article, and wasn't quite sure what to make of it. I was hoping someone in D&D will have some thoughts: https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-internet-flips-elections-and-alters-our-thoughts

My first thought, as I began reading, was that the whole thing was pretty :tinfoil:

. Talking about dystopian sci-fi in a discussion of the real world normally strikes me as a crank warning sign. Having said that, someone who has a PhD (in a field relevant to the discussion) from Harvard, has written articles appearing in multiple very mainstream publications, and was editor-in-chief of Psychology Today back before it became crap is probably not a complete crank. More importantly, the article is based on the author's research published in PNAS. On the third hand, there's a distinction to be drawn between Epstein's research findings and the broader conclusions he draws from them in the article.

One key element of Epstein's findings is that presenting people with deliberately skewed search engine results can influence who they support in an election, with almost none of them realizing that the search results have been deliberately skewed. Seems worrying, but it's not like Google is doing that in the real world...right?

Epstein raises two bigger issues here. This is the less :tinfoil:

of the two:

Robert Epstein posted:

We have also learned something very disturbing � that search engines are influencing far more than what people buy and whom they vote for. We now have evidence suggesting that on virtually all issues where people are initially undecided, search rankings are impacting almost every decision that people make. They are having an impact on the opinions, beliefs, attitudes and behaviours of internet users worldwide � entirely without people�s knowledge that this is occurring. This is happening with or without deliberate intervention by company officials; even so-called �organic� search processes regularly generate search results that favour one point of view, and that in turn has the potential to tip the opinions of millions of people who are undecided on an issue. In one of our recent experiments, biased search results shifted people�s opinions about the value of fracking by 33.9 per cent.

Arguably this is simply search engines doing what they're supposed to. It would be worse if search results made the "pro" and "con" sides of every issue seem equal. On the other hand, it's not as if search results about controversial subjects reflect some perfectly objective weighing of the evidence (if such a thing were even possible); Google's algorithm undoubtedly takes into account factors that correlate very imperfectly with truth. Still, I assume everyone who gives the matter some thought is aware of this.

The more worrying (and more :tinfoil:

) possibility Epstein raises is that Google could deliberately skews results for particular searches. There seems to be real evidence that Google results favor certain Google products of their competitors, which has led to antitrust issues. Even here, though, I'm not sure Google is doing anything really unethical, since many of the products in question are basically just specialized search engines anyway, and there's no attempt to hide the fact that things like Google+ and Google Maps are Google products. What's really worrying is the possibility of Google skewing results for political topics.

Robert Epstein posted:

In most countries, 90 per cent of online search is conducted on Google, which gives the company even more power to flip elections than it has in the US and, with internet penetration increasing rapidly worldwide, this power is growing. In our PNAS article, Robertson and I calculated that Google now has the power to flip upwards of 25 per cent of the national elections in the world with no one knowing this is occurring. In fact, we estimate that, with or without deliberate planning on the part of company executives, Google�s search rankings have been impacting elections for years, with growing impact each year. And because search rankings are ephemeral, they leave no paper trail, which gives the company complete deniability.

...

Certainly, if Google set about to fix an election, it could first dip into its massive database of personal information to identify just those voters who are undecided. Then it could, day after day, send customised rankings favouring one candidate to just those people. One advantage of this approach is that it would make Google�s manipulation extremely difficult for investigators to detect.

But just because they can doesn't mean they do. Epstein doesn't directly state that Google does deliberately manipulate elections via search results (there's not enough evidence for that), but he seems to consider it likely.

Robert Epstein posted:

Looking ahead to the November 2016 US presidential election, I see clear signs that Google is backing Hillary Clinton. In April 2015, Clinton hired Stephanie Hannon away from Google to be her chief technology officer and, a few months ago, Eric Schmidt, chairman of the holding company that controls Google, set up a semi-secret company � The Groundwork � for the specific purpose of putting Clinton in office. The formation of The Groundwork prompted Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks, to dub Google Clinton�s �secret weapon� in her quest for the US presidency.

We now estimate that Hannon�s old friends have the power to drive between 2.6 and 10.4 million votes to Clinton on election day with no one knowing that this is occurring and without leaving a paper trail. They can also help her win the nomination, of course, by influencing undecided voters during the primaries. Swing voters have always been the key to winning elections, and there has never been a more powerful, efficient or inexpensive way to sway them than SEME [Search Engine Manipulation Effect].

At this point, presented with such worrying ideas, I started looking for a possible ulterior motivation on the author's part (which was perhaps motivated reasoning on my part). And I found one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Epstein

Wikipedia posted:

In 2012, Epstein publicly disputed with Google Search over a security warning placed on links to his website.[10] His website, which features mental health screening tests, was blocked for serving malware that could infect visitors to the site. Epstein emailed "Larry Page, Google's chief executive; David Drummond, Google�s legal counsel; Dr. Epstein's congressman; and journalists from The New York Times, The Washington Post, Wired, and Newsweek."[10] In it, Epstein threatened legal action if the warning concerning his website was not removed, and denied that any problems with his website existed.[10] Several weeks later, Epstein admitted his website had been hacked, but still blamed Google for tarnishing his name and not helping him find the infection.[11]

So does Epstein just have a grudge against Google? Even if he does, does that make him wrong?