Big Tech’s biggest threat to democracy isn’t censorship or privacy: it’s election manipulation.
At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, “Google and Censorship through Search Engines,” Dr. Robert Epstein, who researches the impact of Google, informed the hearing that “upwards of 15 million votes” were in jeopardy in the 2020 election. During his testimony, Epstein told Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) that in 2016, Google gave at least 2.6 million votes to Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, “through bias and search results.” He stressed that was the lowest number.
When questioned further by Cruz, Epstein gave a more concise answer: “The range is between 2.6 and 10.4 million votes depending on how aggressive they were in using the techniques that I’ve been studying, such as the search engine manipulation effect, the search suggestion effect, the answer bot effect, and a number of others. They control these and no one can counteract them. These are not competitive. These are tools that they have at their disposal exclusively.”
Cruz was shocked by this, responding, “If any headline comes out of this hearing, that should be it.”
Epstein further warned, “In 2020, you can bet that all of these companies are going to go all out, and the methods they are using are invisible, they’re subliminal, they are more powerful than most any effects I’ve ever seen in behavioral sciences and I’ve been in behavioral sciences for almost 40 years.” – READ MORE