Facebook isn’t the only Silicon Valley firm with partisan oversight of what we see: the bipartisan billionaire class and their security state have partnered with tech firms since the dawn of the internet to control the parameters of users’ thinking.
by Morgan Artyukhina
Part 14 - Ok Google, track me
Today, Google’s power over how we gather information about the world and make our subsequent determinations about it is truly massive.
The work of behavioral research psychologist Dr. Robert Epstein has helped expose the power Google holds over public opinion: in 2015, he first described the Search Engine Manipulation Effect in a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and he has continued to polish the theory ever since.
Epstein wrote in a Politico article at the time titled, “How Google Could Rig the 2016 Election: Google has the ability to drive millions of votes to a candidate with no one the wiser,” that “Google’s search algorithm can easily shift the voting preferences of undecided voters by 20 percent or more – up to 80 percent in some demographic groups – with virtually no one knowing they are being manipulated.”
The work of behavioral research psychologist Dr. Robert Epstein has helped expose the power Google holds over public opinion: in 2015, he first described the Search Engine Manipulation Effect in a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and he has continued to polish the theory ever since.
Epstein wrote in a Politico article at the time titled, “How Google Could Rig the 2016 Election: Google has the ability to drive millions of votes to a candidate with no one the wiser,” that “Google’s search algorithm can easily shift the voting preferences of undecided voters by 20 percent or more – up to 80 percent in some demographic groups – with virtually no one knowing they are being manipulated.”
Google ranks searches according to what it thinks users want to find, resulting in what the company calls “the 10 blue links,” i.e., the first page of search results that pop up after hitting the Enter key. According to a 2014 study, 90 percent of users don’t advance to page 2 of search results, and a 2019 study found that the first 5 links account for two thirds of page 1 clicks. As a result, high placement grants a much greater likelihood of being found and clicked on. With Google accounting for more than 79 percent of all global desktop search traffic, that’s immense power.
While Google CEO Sundar Pichai swore before Congress in December 2018 that Google doesn’t make manual adjustments to the content it shows people, claiming that what’s instead responsible is a complex algorithm that takes into account the search result sites’ traffic, relevant terms searched, and other items, internal company documents leaked to the Daily Caller in April 2019 showed that humans do still manually prune the search engine’s blacklists across multiple features on the site.
One such blacklist, the XPA news blacklist, covers nearly every feature except for the 10 blue links and is governed in part by a “misrepresentation policy,” which is supposed to involve protecting users from sites that try to trick you into clicking on links on accident, but which was revealed by the Caller to include a host of conservative media outlets.
One such blacklist, the XPA news blacklist, covers nearly every feature except for the 10 blue links and is governed in part by a “misrepresentation policy,” which is supposed to involve protecting users from sites that try to trick you into clicking on links on accident, but which was revealed by the Caller to include a host of conservative media outlets.
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