Google is a monopolistic internet search service whose partisan employees and rigged algorithms manipulate information to influence voter decisions — a real and present danger to our democracy.
A 2015 research paper by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) presents evidence from five experiments in two countries suggesting the power and robustness of the search engine manipulation effect (SEME). Specifically, they show that (i) biased search rankings can shift the voting preferences of undecided voters by 20% or more, (ii) the shift can be much higher in some demographic groups, and (iii) such rankings can be masked so that people show no awareness of the manipulation.
Here are the researchers’ sobering conclusions:
Given that search engine companies are currently unregulated, our results could be viewed as a cause for concern, suggesting that such companies could affect—and perhaps are already affecting—the outcomes of close elections worldwide.
[Note: Elections are often won by small vote margins. Fifty percent of US presidential elections were won by vote margins under 7.6%, and 25% of US senatorial elections in 2012 were won by vote margins under 6.0%. In close elections, undecided voters can make all of the difference, which is why enormous resources are often focused on those voters in the days before the election.]
Restricting search ranking manipulations to voters who have been identified as undecided while also donating money to favored candidates would be an especially subtle, effective, and efficient way of wielding influence.
Although voters are subjected to a wide variety of influences during political campaigns, we believe that the manipulation of search rankings might exert a disproportionately large influence over voters for four reasons:
- As we noted, the process by which search rankings affect voter preferences might interact synergistically with the process by which voter preferences affect search rankings, thus creating a sort of digital bandwagon effect that magnifies the potential impact of even minor search ranking manipulations.
- Campaign influence is usually explicit, but search ranking manipulations are not. Such manipulations are difficult to detect, and most people are relatively powerless when trying to resist sources of influence they cannot see. Of greater concern in the present context, when people are unaware they are being manipulated, they tend to believe they have adopted their new thinking voluntarily.
- Candidates normally have equal access to voters, but this need not be the case with search engine manipulations. Because the majority of people in most democracies use a search engine provided by just one company, if that company chose to manipulate rankings to favor particular candidates or parties, opponents would have no way to counteract those manipulations. Perhaps worse still, if that company left election-related search rankings to market forces, the search algorithm itself might determine the outcomes of many close elections.
- With the attention of voters shifting rapidly toward the Internet and away from traditional sources of information, the potential impact of search engine rankings on voter preferences will inevitably grow over time, as will the influence of people who have the power to control such rankings.
We conjecture, therefore, that unregulated election-related search rankings could pose a significant threat to the democratic system of government.
This is no longer a “what if,” futuristic concern. Unfortunately, we are currently experiencing search engine manipulations, monopolistic market conditions and news media transitions:
SEARCH ENGINE MANIPULATIONS
February 2018: Google search algorithms are not impartial. They can be biased, just like their designers.
April 2018: No Paper Trail’ for Google Search Manipulation
April 2018: Google Search Manipulation Can Swing Nearly 80 Percent of Undecided Voters
June 2018: When Will Google Defend Democracy?
June 2018: Europe Has Fined Google $2.7 billion for Manipulating Search Results
June 2018: Google’s Search-Ranking Manipulation Is Affecting Elections
August 2018: Trump accuses Google search engine of story-selecting bias
September 2018: Did Google Meddle In 2016 Election More Than Russia?
September 2018: Google and Big Tech Bias Hurts Democracy, Not Just Conservatives
September 2018: 5 Times Google Manipulated Search, YouTube, and News Results
September 2018: Google employees considered manipulating search results to help protest Trump’s travel ban
October 2018: Senior Google Search Engineer Advocates for Censorship of ‘Terrorist’ Marsha Blackburn
MONOPOLISTIC MARKET CONDITIONS
Over 90% of all searches are conducted on Google platforms.
NEWS MEDIA TRANSITIONS
U.S. adults are increasingly turning away from TV news and toward online news, which includes the product of Google’s internet search platforms.
The writing is on the wall. The time has come for the U.S. government to step up. The EU has a plan for regulating Google, and the European Parliament has already voted to break up Google. Facebook is next. These companies have become too powerful. To quote Dr. Robert Epstein, a Senior Research Psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology, “Google is influencing people‘s opinions without their knowledge, without their permission, and without leaving a paper trail for authorities to track. So we’re talking about extremely dangerous and brand new forms of influence that have never existed before, never in any form, and never on this scale.”
The United States Congress must act swiftly to regulate Google and protect our democracy.