WASHINGTON (SBG) - Supposed bias inside Google's algorithms might have prompted millions of Americans to shift their votes toward Democrats this election season, according to research psychologist Robert Epstein.
Google's algorithmic progressions very likely manipulated a giant swath of American voters, shifting their votes in one direction,
Epstein told the Sinclair Broadcast Group Tuesday. Epstein cited research from a team he assembled to measure whether Google's search engine influenced the election.
"If the targeted messaging and the search results bias were both being used for several months before the election, that would have shifted at least 6 million votes in one direction," he said without going into detail about the tools he used to make his determination. Epstein recruited agents during the 2016 campaign to code Google search results in multiple states as pro-Trump or pro-Democrat.
Epstein made similar points during an interview Monday night with Fox News host Tucker Carlson, noting that his researchers are still combing through a vast trove of search results his 733 field agents collected in Arizona, Florida, and North Carolina.
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"Google search results were strongly biased in favor of liberals and Democrats," Epstein told Carlson Monday. "This was not true on Bing or Yahoo. The bias was shown to pretty much every demographic group we looked at, including conservatives. In fact, conservatives got slightly more liberal bias in their search results than liberals did."
U.S. President Donald Trump and Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden participate in the first presidential debate moderated by Fox News anchor Chris Wallace (C). (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)
Epstein, a senior research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology, published a paper in 2017 suggesting that Google’s bias affected the vote in the 2016 election. He
argued in an Epoch Times article in March that Republicans cannot win in 2020 in which Epstein suggested the president will be fighting big tech and whoever the Democrats nominated.
Epstein also told Carlson that Google's vote reminder on the company's homepage was sent only to liberals during part of the campaign season. He said his field agents did not observe notifications directed at conservative content. Epstein said he went public with his findings after several days of monitoring Google's reminder notification, which he claims prompted Google to back off and begin reminding conservatives.
Carlson noted at one point during the interview that 6 million votes is the margin of the election's outcome --
nearly 150 million people cast ballots during the 2020 election. President Donald Trump collected 73 million votes while President-elect Joe Biden accumulated 80 million.
"Any allegations that Google deliberately designed search algorithms or intervened with the intent of swaying voters is categorically false," Alex Krasov, a Google spokesman, told Sinclair. "The promotions we ran on our homepage ahead of Election Day to encourage voting were visible to all users in all states." Epstein has continued to publish "misleading studies with methodologies that have been widely debunked," he added.
In 2016, Epstein and his researchers recruited 95 monitors in 24 states who captured more than 13,000 sets of search rankings, as well as the 98,000 pages to which they linked. The searches his moderators collected were related to the 2016 election and were more likely to produce links to pages showing a favorable impression of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton than to ones favorable to Trump, Epstein
said at the time.
Epstein recruited a different group of researchers to use a point scale to rate the alleged bias of the articles found, CNN
reported in 2019. A pro-Trump article was given a minus-5 label, while a heavily pro-Clinton article got a plus-5. This group determined that Google’s results were more pro-Clinton, in both red states and blue states.
Epstein, who published his 2016 research
online on the website Hacker Noon, extrapolated his past research to determine such searches could potentially affect up to 10.4 million votes. Extrapolating such limited data is not an effective way to determine whether Google's supposed bias algorithms will impact a person's vote, according to critics.
"You can't zero in on Google and have Google be your only factor in your analysis to shape one's voting outcomes," Ramesh Srinivasan, a professor of information studies at University of California, Los Angeles,
told CNN in 2019. There are other factors at play in determining how someone might vote, including other communication platforms that might impact how voters perceive the political landscape, he noted.
Facebook, for one, was gamed by Russian agents who were attempting to manipulate Americans ahead of the 2016 election, Srinivasan argued.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai testifies before the House Judiciary Committee at the Rayburn House Office Building on December 11, 2018 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)
Republican members of the Senate Commerce Committee grilled CEOs Jack Dorsey of Twitter, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, and Sundar Pichai of Google in October, accusing Facebook and Twitter of suppressing a
New York Post report that month into Biden's son Hunter Biden's overseas business dealings.
Democrats also criticized Dorsey and the other executives, accusing them of bad practices that help Republican candidates.
"Mr. Dorsey, who the hell elected you and put you in charge of what the media are allowed to report and what the American people are allowed to hear? And why do you persist in behaving as a Democratic super PAC, silencing views contrary to your political beliefs?" Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, asked Dorsey during the hearing.
Cruz was referring to Twitter's move in October to block tweets from users
who were posting the Post’s Oct. 14 report, telling users that the unverified story violates platform policy because it contained private information. Dorsey backed off that move during the hearing, telling lawmakers that the company had changed its policies.
Facebook spokesman Andy Stone announced in an Oct. 14 tweet that the company would begin reducing the spread of the Post’s report as well.
The Department of Justice filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google on Oct. 20,
alleging the tech company unlawfully maintains monopolies through anticompetitive behavior in the search and search advertising markets.
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