Why the Free-and-Fair Election Is In Jeopardy

EmpowerU brings you the long requested class on Google to be presented by Dr. Robert Epstein live Webinar for EmpowerU only. Dr. Epstein's 2015 report entitled "The Search Engine Manipulation Effect (SEME) and Its Possible Impact on the Outcomes of Elections" (https://bit.ly/1REqzEY) has been accessed or downloaded more than 200,000 times from PNAS's (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) website. The report describes one of the largest effects ever discovered in the behavioral sciences, and because SEME is nearly invisible as a source of influence and leaves no paper trail for authorities to follow, it is an especially dangerous form of influence.

Dr. Epstein's research suggests that Search Engine Manipulation Effect is currently determining the outcomes of upwards of 25 percent of the world's national elections and that it is affecting a wide range of opinions, not just voting preferences. In 2016, Dr. Epstein discovered that the search suggestions we see in Google's "autocomplete" can also be used to shift votes and opinions without people's knowledge - a manipulation he calls the "Search Suggestion Effect" (SSE).
Dr. Epstein has also built the only systems ever deployed to capture the ephemeral content that search engines show people. In the days leading up to the 2016 presidential election in the U.S., he preserved 13,207 election-related searches on Google, Bing, and Yahoo, along with the 98,044 web pages to which the search results linked. He found a significant pro-Clinton bias in Google search results (but not in Bing or Yahoo results), sufficient to have convinced between 2.6 and 10.4 million undecided voters to vote for Mrs. Clinton without knowing they had been influenced. Dr. Epstein reported these findings even though he was a Clinton supporter and is not a conservative politically.

In 2018, he preserved 47,294 searches and 392,274 web pages, again finding a significant pro-liberal bias only on the Google search engine. This time the bias was sufficient to have shifted upwards of 78.2 million votes to Democrats (spread across hundreds of elections). He is currently raising funds to build a much larger and more comprehensive monitoring system in 2020, one that will monitor many potentially biased sources of online influence, not just search results. You can donate money to aid in this effort at http://MyGoogleResearch.com.

Recorded on March 31, 2020

Learn about EmpowerU and more at empoweruamerica.org