Behavioural psychologist Robert Epstein believes Google can and does influence voters and that research teams in Canada and elsewhere need to monitor how users are being swayed.
Epstein, the former editor-in-chief of Psychology Today and founder of the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology, said in an interview he has found about a dozen means for Big Tech to influence voters and is actively studying seven of them.
“We’ve confirmed that these techniques are being used. That has also been confirmed by now about a dozen whistleblowers, mainly from Google, and by leaked documents, leaked emails and a couple of leaked videos. So we know for sure that these techniques are being used, even though officially Google denies this over and over,” Epstein said.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai testified to a U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee that his company had no blacklists and was politically neutral, but Epstein disagrees.
Since 2013, Epstein has researched what he calls the “Search Engine Manipulation Effect”. His studies demonstrated that placing one candidate above another in search results can shift voting preferences for the undecided by 20 per cent, and as high as 80 per cent for some demographics.
“If that number of people who can be shifted invisibly is a lot larger than the projected win margin, then we say, okay, the outcome of this election is actually in the hands of Big Tech, primarily Google. And they’ll get away with it because no one is documenting, no one’s collecting the information. And it’s probably not even illegal.”
Lately, Epstein’s research has paid attention to the videos YouTube suggests after the current video ends.
“More than 93 per cent of the videos that were being suggested by the ‘next’ YouTube algorithm were heavily leaning in the left direction, in other words, in the liberal direction. I lean left myself, so that’s fine with me. But the fact is, that kind of bias was going toward not just liberals, but toward moderates and conservatives,” Epstein said.
In the week leading up to the 2020 U.S. Presidential election, Epstein recruited 732 field agents in three swing states and preserved their ephemeral experiences on Google, Bing and Yahoo. The results showed a liberal bias of over 0.125 for Google searches and a conservative bias of over 0.025 for non-Google searches. When conservative voters saw the Google homepage on election day, they received reminders to vote just over 40 per cent of the time, compared to more than 50 per cent for liberals and more than 70 per cent for moderates.
Epstein recruited 1,003 field agents in Georgia for the Senate elections in January and made his efforts highly public. In the week leading up to that election, his analysis showed Google’s bias disappeared. Epstein believes his findings reinforce the importance of such research.
“The way to keep these tech companies out of our homes and out of our election is just permanent large scale monitoring systems. This needs to be set up in the US, which is my focus, but it also needs to be set up in Canada and everywhere else where we pretend we have a democracy,” Epstein said.
‘I’ve been contacted over and over again by people [in other countries] saying, ‘Are you monitoring here?’…No, of course we’re not because it’s extremely labor intensive, it’s extremely expensive, it’s also extremely stressful because we’re being attacked nonstop digitally. And we have all kinds of crazy things we have to do to protect our data and the flow of data.”
Prior to the Canadian federal election, the Liberal government proposed regulations for YouTube, Facebook and other platforms that would require them to take down hate speech and share their algorithms with the government. Epstein said that won’t affect the bias problem.
“That [legislation] doesn’t hurt these companies at all…Australia passed a law two years ago giving them access to Google algorithms. That’s absolutely, totally useless. Algorithms are completely opaque. I’m a programmer, I’ve been a programmer almost my whole life. Algorithms are opaque even to the people who did the programming…Nothing to see here,” Epstein said.
Would Google influence a Canadian election? Epstein believes so.
“It would be impossible for them not to take a position. Impossible. They have interests in Canada regarding the passage of laws, for example, that favor their company. They have interests in Canada regarding the promotion of their own political views and their own values. They have gone on record repeatedly saying that they’re going to use all the techniques at their disposal to promote company values,” said Epstein.
“Canada and every country is getting influenced and they don’t know it….This is a concentration of power that the likes of which have never existed. Here we’re talking about primarily one company located in Silicon Valley determining the thinking and behavior of actually now it’s over 3 billion people and in the position to determine the outcomes of close elections in almost every country in the world except China and North Korea.”
“I’ll bet you if we were monitoring Canada, oh, my goodness, I think people would be shocked.”
Lee Harding is a research associate with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.
Photo by Brett Jordan from Pexels.
