Epstein at Masters of the Universe Town Hall: ‘Google Favored Search Results for Clinton Over Trump’

Robert Epstein, a senior research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology, claimed during Breitbart News’ “Masters of the Universe” town hall tonight that Google favored positive search results of Hillary Clinton above those of President Trump.

Epstein discussed his work surrounding the power of tech companies on elections and their influence on voters saying, “I have been studying for more than five years with controlled experiments around the world, four national elections, tens of thousands of people. I’ve been studying exactly how many votes or opinions Google can change, Google can shift, just by them manipulating those search results when we type in a search term and they give us a list.”

“It turns out that what’s at the top of the list,” said Epstein, “people believe is better and truer than what’s lower in the list, that’s why 50 percent of the clicks go to the top two items.” Epstein continued, “so it turns out we showed in our studies that if you favor one candidate in search results, so maybe higher ranked results make that candidate look better, you click on it, it takes you to a webpage that makes that candidate look really good, if you favor one candidate in search results among voters who are undecided you can easily shift at least 20 percent of them towards that candidate, up to 80 percent. And at least one demographic group that we found and the most vulnerable group that we’ve ever found in our five years of studies, is moderate Republicans.”

“You could’ve guessed that,” joked Ann Coulter. Alex Marlow interjected, “but luckily, since Google are the masters of the universe with their incredible amounts of power they decided to be entirely fair and keep the results equal for Trump and Hillary Clinton, correct?” Epstein paused before replying, “no… no, that was sarcasm right?”

Marlow said, “but this is something that in your research you looked at when you start typing into a Google search bar and you start typing ‘D-O-N-A-L’ it’ll give you some result probably Donald Trump-based, same thing for Hillary Clinton when you start typing names that should yield familiar search terms, the terms for Donald Trump were more negative, the terms for Hillary Clinton were more positive, is that what you found?”

“There’s two main things that we have found,” said Epstein. “We came up with a system, a monitoring system for monitoring search results on Google, Bing and Yahoo for nearly six months before the election in 2016. This story about our findings was broken by the Washington Post in early 2017 and here’s what we found. We found that Google’s search results favored Hillary Clinton in all ten positions of those search results on the first page for almost all of those six months leading up to the election. Now that’s enough to shift two to three million votes, at least, without anyone knowing that they have been manipulated.”

“Another thing, we followed up on a media report, it was kind of a hysterical media report by an organization named Sourcefed, they said ‘we just figured out that when you’re doing searches, you’re typing in search terms, you can’t get negatives for Hillary Clinton on Google. So eight people on my staff spent that summer of 2016, I published in the fall of that year, seeing if they could get negatives for Hillary Clinton.”

“So, for example, we typed in on Bing and Yahoo, ‘Hillary Clinton is….’ and we get ‘Hillary Clinton is the devil’, ‘Hillary Clinton is sick’, Hillary Clinton is dying of cancer’, literally eight or ten extremely negative search results because that’s what people were, in fact, searching for. So then we go to Google, I have screenshots of all of this, we type in ‘Hillary Clinton is…’ and we get ‘Hillary Clinton is awesome’, ‘Hillary Clinton is winning’, and that’s it.”

An example of the search manipulation can be seen below.