Psychologist Dr. Robert Epstein appeared on SiriusXM Patriot’s Breitbart
News Sunday to discuss Google’s power and influence over public
opinion and voting patterns with Breitbart News Deputy political editor
Amanda House.
On the topic of a recent report
which claimed Google employees spoke about burying conservative websites
such as Breitbart and the Daily Caller in an effort to “reverse things
in four years,” Epstein declared, “It’s just another indication, Amanda,
of what a lot of us have suspected for a long time. It just confirms
based on actual communications within the company that Google has the
power to shift the votes and opinions on anything, and they discuss the
power. They wouldn’t discuss it if they didn’t have it, and they
exercise the power. There’s simply no question about that.”
“We’ve seen a number of leaks in the last couple of months. Before
that, for almost twenty years, Google was very good at keeping its
secrets. But lately we’ve been seeing what things look like from the
inside, and it’s pretty scary,” Epstein continued. “There’s lots of
research now showing that in fact we trust the information we get from
algorithms, like Google search algorithms, more than we trust any other
media source because people don’t understand what an algorithm is and
they think that, you know, it’s a computer algorithm showing this
information, it must be the best. It must be correct.”
“And that’s why in our experiments, some of them show that you can use
Google search results to shift people’s opinions and voting preferences
by up to eighty percent in some demographic groups, and by the way, the
most vulnerable demographic group we’ve ever found in the U.S. is
moderate Republicans,” he explained. “They’re incredibly trusting of
Google search results.”
After being asked if he found any Google search irregularities during
the Midterm elections, Epstein replied, “I can tell you now, on the
record… Yes, I did. I did this secretly in 2016, capturing around 13,000
election-related searches on Google, Bing, and Yahoo, and this time I
captured about 40,000 election-related searches on Google, Bing, and
Yahoo, so yes I did.”
Noting that he isn’t a political conservative, Epstein concluded by
stating that concerns over Google’s power are “bigger than one’s
politics.”
“Whatever Google happens to be doing today, whoever they happen to be
favoring today, they might not favor tomorrow,” Epstein concluded. “We
all need to be concerned about one company having this much power to
shape opinions and flip elections, and without them being accountable to
the public, without them being constrained in any way by any regulations
or laws. That’s my concern. I think it’s bigger than one’s politics…
This is a concern we should all share.”
Charlie
Nash is a
reporter for Breitbart
Tech. You can
follow
him on
Twitter @MrNashington,
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his page at
Facebook.
Follow
Amanda House
on Twitter and
Instagram
at @amandaleehouse.