Research psychologist Dr. Robert Epstein is launching America’s Digital Shield, a website that exposes Big Tech meddling in the 2024 elections through real-time “ephemeral manipulation” that can shift millions of votes.
Epstein announced the release of a “public data dashboard” that shows how Big Tech giants like Google, Bing, and Yahoo are manipulating online content to influence votes in the elections, according to a press release sent to Breitbart News.
The new public dashboard, named America’s Digital Shield can be viewed here.
The findings presented by Epstein, a Harvard-trained senior research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology (AIBRT), raise concerns about the integrity of the democratic process amid Big Tech corporations’ ability to wield unparalleled amounts of power with regards to public consumption of online content.
“If we don’t stop them, Google alone will be able to shift between 6.4 and 25.5 million votes in the 2024 Presidential election,” Epstein said.
The findings are based on “a sophisticated proprietary monitoring system his research team has been developing since 2016” that tracks “ephemeral experiences,” which are “short-lived online content that can alter perceptions and behaviors before disappearing without a trace,” the press release explained.
This content includes search results, news feeds, video recommendations, and other temporary online content that normally disappears forever, but that is now being preserved, archived, and analyzed by the “Digital Shield” that Epstein and his team have developed.
Notably, these manipulations are powerful enough to shift voting preferences of undecided voters by up to 80 percent after just one exposure, with the potential to shift millions of votes in aggregate, Epstein said.
“This system is how — for the first time ever — we have finally made the Big Tech companies accountable to the public,” Epstein said. “We know from a smaller system we set up in 2020 that when these companies know they’re being monitored, they back down.”
“Permanent, large-scale monitoring systems are the only way to stop Big Tech companies from manipulating our elections, undermining our democracy, and indoctrinating our children,” the research psychologist added. “Laws and regulations — if they’re ever enacted at all — will never stop them. Only monitoring makes their activities transparent 24 hours a day. Only monitoring can stop them.”
Epstein has long been warning about the power Big Tech has to meddle in elections.
In 2019, he testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee, where he told senators that Google election meddling gave Hillary Clinton at least 2.6 million additional votes in the 2016 election.
Epstein also warned that Google has been manipulating voters “on a massive scale,” using tools that it has at its disposal exclusively, and that “no one can counteract them.” He also said that Big Tech is more powerful than anything he has seen in 40 years of behavioral sciences.
You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Facebook and X/Twitter at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.
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