Donald Trump is currently under indictment for attempting to interfere with the 2020 election. But one of the most powerful companies in the world may have swung millions of votes for the Democrats in many elections, with no repercussions whatsoever. According to psychologist and Big Tech researcher Dr. Robert Epstein, that is what Google is doing every day, but especially around election time.
“We know how political campaigns work to get votes, sometimes even using dirty tricks, but at least it’s a competitive thing,” psychologist and Big Tech researcher Dr. Robert Epstein tells Peter Schweizer and Eric Eggers on the most recent episode of The DrillDown. “If a platform like Google wants to influence the outcome of an election, there’s nothing you can do.”
Alphabet, Inc., Google’s parent company, faces a lawsuit by the U.S. Department of Justice for anti-trust concerns. Google pays companies like Apple, Samsung, and other telecom giants billions of dollars to maintain its spot as the dominant search engine, as the U.S. Justice Department told a federal judge. The company also gives massive payments to the makers of alternative web browsers that compete with its own, just to maintain Google’s search engine as the default option on those products.
But Epstein says that lawsuit is really a distraction from the more important issue: Google’s deliberate and politically motivated biasing of its search algorithm. “This is really a consumer protection issue, but instead the DOJ is focused on a losing anti-trust case,” he tells Peter and Eric. Google does not want people to realize how powerful its ability to manipulate peoples’ opinions really is.
For example, he says, Google “gets us to focus on other election issues (like ballot harvesting) as a distraction. Remember, these companies are the ones who determine which news stories go viral. They want to occupy our minds with stories about smaller dirty tricks.”
Why?
“Because they don’t want you looking at them,” Dr. Epstein said. “The stories about ‘traditional’ election interference involve may a few votes here and there, but these platforms are shifting literally millions of votes, without people noticing what’s going on.”
Although Epstein describes himself as a liberal Democrat, he separates his politics from his research. During the 2020 presidential election, monitoring by Epstein’s 1,000 volunteer user agents in the state of Georgia showed that Google was specifically targeting messages to Democratic voters up until four days before the presidential election. “We caught them doing it, and they backed down,” he told Fox News in 2021.
But the impact on the country’s political landscape remains significant. Epstein says that Google’s election interference has cost Republicans not only the presidential election in 2020, but up to 8 seats in the US Senate, and as many as 40 seats in Congress.
Ahead of the 2022 election, Epstein shared what his team of monitors was seeing, and a reporter from the New York Post wrote a story summarizing the search manipulation in Georgia and elsewhere that Epstein had documented. But the paper declined to run the story after Google became aware of it. “This was right after the Hunter Biden laptop story, when the Post had its Twitter account suspended, so Google was literally the only way people could find the New York Post,” Epstein told The DrillDown. “Google can put you out of business.”
Shortly after, Epstein shared his findings with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), who sent a letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai. The very same day that letter was delivered, Google turned off the bias in its results, which Epstein’s data agents could confirm almost immediately.
There is no other “watchdog” that monitors how Google’s dominant search engine, or the algorithms that manipulate the “Up Next” suggestions offered on YouTube, truly function. Epstein’s organization has an ambitious plan to monitor on an ongoing basis, not just in the month or two before an election, and is actively seeking donor support for that expanded mission. Readers may learn more and contribute to that effort by visiting MyGoogleResearch.com.
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