Google researcher Dr. Robert Epstein gave the Texas State Senate a crash course in the nefarious election interference that Big Tech has been using to manipulate U.S. politics for years.
Epstein told the Texas State Senate Committee on State Affairs Wednesday he identified “ten new forms of influence that the internet has made possible and that are controlled exclusively by Big Tech companies.” He labeled them “among the most powerful forms of influence ever discovered” and more “dangerous” as they are nearly “invisible to users.” According to Epstein, “Our great nation unknowingly turned over its elections to Big Tech companies in 2012” and the “2020 presidential election was only one of hundreds of elections that Google has flipped.” This year, Epstein predicted, Google could shift between 6.4 and 25 million votes, and YouTube recommendations alone could alter users’ opinions by 40 percent or more. The demographic most vulnerable to this kind of manipulation are moderate Republicans, according to Epstein.
Epstein then offered solutions on “how to make Google and other companies accountable to the public.” Specifically, he suggested declaring “[Google’s] index, a database they use to generate their search results, to be a public commons.” He added, “Second method is you set up a large-scale system that will preserve and analyze the actual data that these companies are sending to real users. In other words, to track them—to do to Google what they do to us and our children 24 hours a day.”
Epstein’s system stores data from some 14,000 non-biased voters, tracking and capturing ephemeral experiences like search results. These experiences sway minds but quickly vanish without leaving hard evidence — until now. “For example, Google is now sending ‘Register to Vote’ reminders to Democrats at two and a half times the rate in which they’re sending them to Republicans,” Epstein stated. “Right now, Google’s YouTube is recommending shockingly violent and sexual videos to children and teens.” He urged the Texas Senate to take action to help ensure a system could be built to produce “court admissible data” in all 50 states. “Monitoring works because it makes them accountable,” he argued.
Indeed, Epstein insisted, “But monitoring can stop them. In November 2020, after Sen. Cruz sent a threatening letter to the CEO of Google about my research findings, Google that very day stopped its election interference in the Georgia runoff elections.” He said further that after his America’s Digital Shield “went public with our new nationwide monitoring system in November 2023” he marked Google’s search results “steadily and gradually becoming less politically biased.” The threat of Big Tech election interference remains very real, however, and Epstein was adamant that more action needed to be taken by lawmakers.
Google’s subsidiaries are also greatly complicit in its scheme, Epstein analyzed.
Epstein later listed ways YouTube influences users in response to a question. The “Up Next” and other recommendations are tailored by YouTube for users. In 2018, Google employees had asked The Wall Street Journal about how to use such ephemeral experiences to “change people’s thinking” on then-President Donald Trump’s travel ban policies, Epstein said. If such methods are weaponized by Big Tech multiple times over, the more they influence people. “People trust algorithms” and “computers because they think they’re inherently objective, so the bias” can affect even those who notice it. Google will even personalize content for individuals, causing “greater” impact. “You have to have the data,” he re-emphasized later, for any real legal challenges to Big Tech’s power to be successful.
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