Psychologist and researcher Dr. Robert Epstein and MRC Free Speech America Vice President Dan Schneider exposed how Google sways and manipulates U.S. elections.
Schneider and Epstein spoke at an election integrity seminar organized by attorney Cleta Mitchell to help conservative leaders understand the threat mounted by Google. Schneider showed the results of Google’s search result manipulation in favor of Democrats, especially President Joe Biden. Dr. Epstein explained how Google and YouTube change voters’ minds through “ephemeral experiences,” expressing his goal of “shining a light on Google” to stop its election interference.
Schneider discussed MRC Free Speech America’s Google studies, describing the tech behemoth as “the fount of all evil.” Schneider referred to MRC’s 2022 election study showing how Google search results favored Democrat candidates in key midterm Senate races, burying GOP campaign sites in 83 percent of the races. He then explained MRC’s multiple 2023 studies exposing Google’s search result bias burying Biden’s presidential opponents’ websites ahead of each GOP debate. Republican candidates’ websites in particular did not appear on the first page of results.
Dr. Epstein called MRC’s work “rock solid.” Epstein also claimed to go much deeper in the amount and type of data he and his team have collected, with custom software that collects anonymized data from the computers of hundreds of “field agents.”
Epstein went on to provide more details on just how Google produces skewed results to sway millions of vulnerable voters. The key to Google’s manipulation of elections is what Epstein calls “ephemeral experiences.” These include the order of search results, suggested search terms, highly partisan get-out-the-vote reminders or even Google-owned YouTube’s algorithm-driven video suggestions of videos for users’ “watch next.” These ephemeral experiences quickly come and go but they can still change minds—especially moderate Republicans.
In 2016, 2018, 2020 and 2022, Epstein said that he and his team recorded thousands and then millions of these ephemeral experiences. Algorithms are not objective as people imagine, but are programmed a certain way, Epstein explained. Studies conducted by Epstein found a 40+ percent shift in favor of a candidate based on Google’s search engine bias. On his new platform, which collects Google ephemeral experiences data in real-time from politically balanced “field agents” around the country, Epstein keeps a list of elections he says were flipped by Google. The 2020 presidential election is included on his list of flipped elections.
“Trump won five out of the thirteen swing states in 2020,” Epstein said. “Our data show that if Google had not been interfering in those states, Trump would have won eleven of the thirteen swing states easily … so that was truly a stolen election.” And that Google election interference carried over into 2022, and is now continuing into the 2024 election season. “The GOP would have had a majority in the Senate of between two and eight seats” without 2022 Google bias, Epstein argued. Google and YouTube—which dominate the internet—still consistently display a heavy leftist bias to manipulate voters.
Epstein did, however, provide a glimmer of hope. He noted that when he shared his data with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) in 2020, Cruz and two other senators sent a “threatening letter” to Google, which suddenly caused the bias it had programmed in Georgia to disappear.
“Now imagine how powerful a manipulation that is,” Epstein urged. Google was sending voting reminders “mainly or exclusively to members of one party. That’s what they had been doing in Georgia.” But that stopped upon receiving the Senators’ letter.
Epstein’s team has built a “large-scale, permanent system to capture ephemeral content on a massive scale in all 50 states and shine the light on Google and other companies so that they will stop.” Because, unless Google’s election meddling can be discouraged, as both Schneider and Epstein demonstrated, America will not have free and fair elections.
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