Senators Ted Cruz (R-TX), Ron Johnson (R-WI), and Mike Lee (R-UT) sent a letter to Google demanding answers over a study by psychologist Dr. Robert Epstein pointing to potential election interference by the tech giant.
An ongoing study by Epstein, who has been exploring the links between biased search results and election outcomes for over five years now, discovered signs that Google was sending get-out-the-vote reminders to Democrats while excluding Republicans for a number of days ahead of the election.
The early results of Epstein’s work are quoted in the Senators’ letter to Google (emphasis ours):
In our election monitoring project this year, we recruited a politically-diverse group of 733 field agents in Arizona, Florida, and North Carolina. Through their computers, we were able to preserve more than 400,000 ephemeral experiences that tech companies use to shift opinions and votes and that normally are lost forever.
One of our most disturbing findings so far is that between Monday, October 26th (the day our system became fully operational) and Thursday, October 29th, only our liberal field agents received vote reminders on Google’s home page.
Conservatives did not receive even a single vote reminder. This kind of targeting, if present nationwide, could shift millions of votes, in part because Google’s home page is seen 500 million times a day in the U.S.
The good news is that it appears that we got Google to stop this manipulation four days before Election Day. On Thursday, October 29th, I sent materials about the monitoring project to Ebony Bowden, a reporter at the New York Post, who was writing a story about the project. I did so knowing that all nypost.com emails are shared with algorithms and employees at Google.
Late night on the 29th, two notable things happened: First, Ms. Bowden’s article, which was about possible large-scale election rigging by Big Tech, was pulled by the Post. Second, Google’s targeted messaging stopped completely. From midnight on the 29th to the end of Election Day, all of our field agents have received the vote reminder. Because of the demographics of the people who use Google, this is still a vote manipulation, but it is far more benign than the extreme targeting we detected last week.
The full letter can be accessed below, or at this link.
In their letter to Google, the Senators asserted that previous assurances provided by the company of its political neutrality are not true.
“Based on Dr. Epstein’s response, it would appear your assertion that ‘We won’t do any work, you know, to politically tilt anything one way or the other’ is not true,” wrote the senators.
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. His new book, #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election, which contains exclusive interviews with sources inside Google, Facebook, and other tech companies, is currently available for purchase.
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