Can Google Influence Elections?

KindMind (897865) writes "From the Washington Post: 'Psychologist Robert Epstein has been researching [how much influence search engines have on voting behavior] and says he is alarmed at what he has discovered. His most recent experiment, whose findings were released Monday, found that search engines have the potential to profoundly influence voters without them noticing the impact ... Epstein, former editor-in-chief of Psychology Today and a vocal critic of Google, has not produced evidence that this or any other search engine has intentionally deployed this power. But the new experiment builds on his earlier work by measuring SEME (Search Engine Manipulation Effect) in the concrete setting of India's national election, whose voting concludes Monday.'"

Comments

Big deal

[Vuojo]

Google will be renamed Weyland-Yutani at some point anyways...

Re:Big deal

[FriendlyLurker]

Yeah the real news here is that the internet is undermining the top down power the traditional oligarchs had over the masses voting behavior via the old-world mass media broadcast companies. If Robert Epstein does not recognize this point, he is just another pawn trying to convince people to go against their own self interest (as is typically the case with most of the two party "first" world Republocrat systems.

Sure Google gets a big chunk of attention via its news service - but so does lots of "horizontal" news we get via social media. I'll take that over TV and newspaper oligarchies any-day thank you. Just finished reading about a big one in fact - 10 to 100 billion siphoned out of Ukraine and other eastern block countries by "offshore structures created and maintained by the west" - you (probably) will only hear about it on social media:

While New Zealand’s Company Law Reform Stalls, GT Group Helps a Thieving Ukrainian Despot
Fraud & Corrupt Practices in Prague & London

Re:Big deal

[flyneye]

Just add a few entries to Youtube in search results and we have THE PEOPLE talking about candidates, pointing out the lies, the history, the payola, what corp. owns them and not a fucking thing a campaign manager can do , but to wet himself. Oh sure the candidate will have a few official videos,like anyone could care after its been plastered over T.V.
Talk about public service announcements, YEAH BABY! No one watches much T.V. anymore, anyway.

Re:Big deal

[TheDarkMaster]

Dammit, where is my mod points when I really need them. Exactly, this is the big point. The Internet has democratized information and oligarchs can not do anything against it. Before they simply bribed or threatened newspapers to hide unwanted news, but now is practically impossible to do that against every single person with access to the internet.

Re:Big deal

[PopeRatzo]

Yeah the real news here is that the internet is undermining the top down power the traditional oligarchs had over the masses voting behavior

Sure, that's why there is such a concerted effort to kill Net Neutrality.

If the internet undermines the "top down power the traditional oligarchs had over the masses voting behavior" only to hand it off to a new set of oligarchs, what has been gained?

We've seen a startling consolidation of the ways in which people can access the internet and increasing controls over what they can do there. As long as all the vaunted "free speech of "The People" is making the gatekeepers money, and doesn't really have that great an effect, it will be tolerated. No further. Do you really believe the internet has transformed peoples' relationship to political power? If you look at the level of entrenchment of corporate money in politics, there's no way you could possibly believe the internet is having anything like a democratizing effect. In fact, with surveillance and snooping, the citizen has probably lost significant power during the Age of the Internet.

We started losing the internet as a source of horizontal political power the day commerce was allowed and encouraged here. Maybe we were fooling ourselves that it could ever be otherwise. The end of Net Neutrality is the end of any possibility the Internet could ever be a source of political power to the People.

You mention some stories coming out of the Ukraine. Do you believe the proliferation of news sources has clarified what's really happening there? I think there's an argument to be made that it's made it nearly impossible to really get a clear picture of the situation. Several times already, I've seen trusted independent news sources get manipulated and fooled completely, only to find themselves slipping further from the truth instead of toward it. Are the nice-looking young women tearing their scarves into rags to make molotov cocktails freedom fighters or murderous terrorists? Are they fighting for independence or at the behest of Western powers? Are they seeking liberty or are they ethic supremacist fascists? Are the professional-looking men in uniforms without insignia keeping peace and order or subverting the will of the people? Several times already I've watched the drama unfold as an independent news blogger promotes some photo or video taken at the scene as showing one thing, only to later find out it shows another entirely. The thing I'm finding about the social-media news sources is that they can also be the easiest to manipulate. And if there are 500 entities reporting on the situation, how do you really vet the story that's filtering down to you?

I'm afraid that between the NSA, Google and the corporate consolidation of ISPs and content providers, the Internet is dead as a way for citizens to keep their governments and the economic elite accountable.

Re:Big deal

[currently_awake]

We have a new set of gate keepers. The same job as the old ones, just new names and faces. If you think Google isn't subject to political manipulation: It certainly looks like they are a willing participant in the NSA spying scandal.

Hmmm...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

So search engines could influence elections; but we have no evidence as yet that they are exploiting that capability, while newspapers, radio, and television have been doing their best in that area more or less since their respective introductions.

Sounds like we'd better start panicking now.

Re:Hmmm...

[augahyde]

Search engines are already implicitly biased based on their search and display algorithms. Google provides results on your past search history attempting to identify those items that you're more likely to read. If you're liberal, you are more likely to get results that include MSN, CNN, etc. Conservatives are more likely to get Fox, etc. These results are already helping to polarize us politically because more inclined to read things we agree with.

Re:Hmmm...

[stephenmac7]

If that's what you're concerned about, try DuckDuckGo.

Re:Hmmm...

[AthanasiusKircher]

Search engines are already implicitly biased based on their search and display algorithms. Google provides results on your past search history attempting to identify those items that you're more likely to read. If you're liberal, you are more likely to get results that include MSN, CNN, etc. Conservatives are more likely to get Fox, etc

Indeed. There's also a name for the phenomenon -- a filter bubble.

There are those who downplay this effect or say it isn't that large. I don't know. In the 2012 election, I searched for Ron Paul news on a regular basis. (I wasn't a supporter, but I found his attempts to overthrow the standard Republican political machine on the local level to be intriguing, and some of the reactions from the party were shocking.)

Pretty soon, I noticed Ron Paul stuff (news reports, links, etc.) showing up much more frequently in Google for me. I got curious and checked some friends -- and they weren't hearing or seeing anything about this, because Google didn't show them the same search results.

Those who already were interested in Ron Paul saw more about him. Those who didn't already know about him weren't seeing any of the crazy things happening with his supporters, because Google apparently decided via its algorithms that they'd rather see more news about cats or celebrity love interests or whatever crap.

It was at that point that I stopped using Google as my standard search engine. (This was also after years of frustration with Google becoming increasingly unable to function as an actual search engine that would look for what I told it to, rather than some wacko variation of my search that dropped half of my search terms arbitrarily and replaced others with "synonyms" that often weren't related at all.)

Re:Hmmm...

[AthanasiusKircher]

This ties in to a more general phenomenon known as confirmation bias.

Confirmation bias is rather different, since it refers to the tendency of people for themselves to seek out information or look for information that confirms their pre-existing beliefs, while ignoring or avoiding information that might contradict them.

The "filter bubble" effect refers to third parties (like search engines, social media like Facebook, etc.) which filter media according to their assumptions about what you may prefer to see.

You can say that the "filter bubble" enables confirmation bias, but in the former, it is a third party that is refusing to show you things it thinks you don't want to see, while in the latter, you are choosing to filter things for yourself (consciously or unconsciously).

The huge difference is that with confirmation bias, you can still encounter things that contradict you, but you have to justify to yourself that they are wrong or not important to read or know about or whatever. With an "ideal" filter bubble, you may never see opposing views or stories in the first place, and thus you gradually come to think that the world is perfectly in accord with your views. The latter is much more extreme, and, since it is controlled by a third party, potentially much more manipulative and dangerous (since those "filters" could be theoretically tweaked in subtle but malicious ways... not saying Google is doing that, but the potential for abuse is much greater). It can also potentially lead to a feedback loop, where your perspectives get ever more narrow and perhaps even more extreme, without the context of alternative views... and without you even realizing it, since you no longer have to actually reject the alternative perspectives: you just don't even know they exist.

Experiment? Science?

[EasyTarget]

Ooooh Epstein; you have so much to learn. Maybe you should Google 'Peer review' etc.

grain of salt?

[l3v1]

Or a rather huge rock of salt. If lots of people are interested in a subject, create pages that link to pages dealing with it, tweet about it, post about it, etc, that will - or should, at least - create a change in ranking, regardless of it being about politicians, or snakes (oh, sorry, they just might be the same :P). Calling the changes in rankings that reflect people's interest - or lack of it - about a certain subject 'influencing' sounds to me very largely misinterpreted. Anyway, if some people can really be influenced by the rankings of a search engine, that's more a testament of those people's intellect or ignorance, than anything else. Plus, the numbers in the mentioned study, and how they were obtained, can't convince me of any 'science' behind them, let alone make me even consider their significance - if any. Especially this one: 'Biased search rankings also changed the extent to which participants indicated they trust the candidates' - which, to me at least, simply sounds crazy stupid.

Of course they can

[pablo_max]

It is a simple fact that they had a mind to, they could drastically impact the elections.

Nearly 90% of the people out there use Google to search for information about everything from the political to lolcatz.
All they would need to do is omit some results from the search and place others high in the list. They can even insert propaganda into seemingly unrelated searches.
Something perhaps designed to manufacture rage at one particular party or candidate.

Controlling all information to have complete power.

Imagine if google and bing decided that a certain candidate didn't exist and the name only returned some unrelated items. No news article links, no info sites, nothing.

Re:Of course they can

[bmajik]

Imagine if google and bing decided that a certain candidate didn't exist and the name only returned some unrelated items. No news article links, no info sites, nothing.

You mean like what "traditional" media did to Ron Paul, Gary Johnson, and Jill Stein?

This story seems like a case of moving goal posts. Of _course_ the place people go to get information skews their thinking about politics and politicians.

If someone is mad about google potentially doing this, it's only because they'd prefer that newspapers and tv stations retained that role by divine right...

Re:Of course they can

[wisnoskij]

The difference is that Google is not media.
They are not offering you an above board opinion, they are passing themselves off as a library of knowledge. But they have the power to easily be an opinion based advise service.

Re:Of course they can

[currently_awake]

It doesn't have to be Google. Your ISP can MIM your searches to "fix" what you see, so can the government. Given how the NSA has behaved, I expect they have at least tried something like this as an experiment.

Re:Of course they can

[bluegutang]

The difference is that everyone knows the media excluded Paul, Johnson, and Stein. If you want, you can tell your friends about it. If enough people are upset, perhaps the media will decide to change.

Whereas if Google decided to manipulate search results before an election, chances are good that nobody would ever find out.

Google wants campaign dollars...

[Bob_Who]

Google will be quite happy to give it a try . Google is here to sell anyone as much influence as they are willing to pay for... All of those anonymous special interest campaign dollars are burning a hole in souls for sale to the highest bidder. Lobbyists might as well be optimized by those who "don't be evil"... but will be profitable and peddle some product .... and we are that product they are selling. Google is the people's pimp.

Bigger problem

[StripedCow]

The bigger problem is that we, the people, have only 1 voting-moment in every term.
You can ask yourself: how is this possible, considering the technological advancements we have been through in the last two decades (in the fields of communication and social media)?
The answer: congress has only itself to blame.

Check out this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Re:Bigger problem

[u38cg]

Because representative democracy. The Athenians tried democracy for reals and it was a fucking disaster.

Re:Bigger problem

[drinkypoo]

Because representative democracy. The Athenians tried democracy for reals and it was a fucking disaster.

No, no they didn't. They gave only racially privileged landowners the vote. That ain't democracy. It's specifically the same kind of oligarchy we have here. Ours just involves more technology which gives the plebes the appearance of having influenced the election while permitting it to be manipulated nine ways from poll day.

They could do it....once

[Anonymous Coward]

Google/Bing could get away with manipulating elections, but as soon as it's publicly revealed they have done so, the people who are really in charge will make it all sorts of illegal, or flat-out destroy them entirely.

Even if you help the party in power, they won't want you to put them out of power.

LMFAO- "Maturity test".

[TapeCutter]

Information will affect what you think, reliable information more so....

"In 2012, Epstein publicly disputed with Google Search over a security warning placed on links to his website.[10] His website, which features mental health screening tests, was blocked for serving malware that could infect visitors to the site. Epstein ...[ threw a very public tantrum, ]... threatened legal action if the warning concerning his website was not removed, and denied that any problems with his website existed.[10] Several weeks later, Epstein admitted his website had been hacked, but still blamed Google for tarnishing his name and not helping him find the infection.[11]" - WP.

The paragraph above that I found via google (top hit) certainly affected the way I think about Epstien. In fact it could be said that google made coffee come out of my nose when I read the line above it - "Epstein has studied psychological maturity and published an online maturity test.".

Re:LMFAO- "Maturity test".

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Maybe it does not, in fact, take one to know (about) one?

Also, since when exactly does Google do free security consulting for every last two-bit malware farm on the internet? They give you a handy warning in the course of assisting their users; but that's sort of the extent of it.

Re:LMFAO- "Maturity test".

[rmdingler]

Please excuse Juan from being a sheep head.

Signed, Epstein's mother's veterinarian.

Information influences decision making

[protoporos]

If you control the information, you can exert significant influence in the decision-making process of the individuals that use your service. You should not need a big research to figure this out.

Actually that happens also to be the most major "design gap" in Democracy (and I say that, even though I'm Greek). The fact that you will increase the decision makers in a topic does not mean that you will get a better & more objective decision, simply because they might lack the proper, accurate information to make an informed judgment. In other words, by increasing N, you average out the localized/special interests, but you also reduce the average amount of information each "unit" has on the topic (because you sum and divide by N).

So, coming back to the topic, accurate information is a key contributing factor for good decision making, especially for important topics like who will be your head of state for the next ~4 years. That is why diversification is beneficial even in your personal "information channels".

Which is why the ranking is automated

[brunes69]

"With a group of more than 1,800 study participants â" all undecided voters in India -- the research team was able to shift votes by an average of 12.5 percent to favored candidates by deliberating altering their rankings in search results, Epstein said. " Which is exactly why Google does not manually manipulate their search result rankings for any reason, no matter who complains about it. Someone brings a lawsuit against Google for their search rankings seemingly every day. No one ever wins. The rankings are decided by an algorithm that for the most part gives very appropriate results. Unless someone shows me evidence that Google is manually manipulating rankings then this is a non-story to me.

Re:Which is why the ranking is automated

[Nemyst]

This isn't picking and choosing, this is following the bloody law. It's not Google's fault if the government and the justice system make this possible, and not complying could end up with Google getting blocked from operating in those countries.

Re:Which is why the ranking is automated

[AthanasiusKircher]

Unless someone shows me evidence that Google is manually manipulating rankings then this is a non-story to me.

Of course they're manipulating rankings, especially through personalization -- you live in a different region, have a different search history, etc., and Google will deliver more content at higher ranks that is supposedly "tailored for you."

Net result of this manipulation is that people can end up in poltical "feedback loops" more easily. We already naturally tend to do this: liberals tend to click on stories on liberal sites with liberal titles or slants; conservatives do the same.

That's all fine -- but what happens when you stop even SEEING what the other side is talking about?

You can argue that Google's personalization is just doing this for everyone, so it's not biased. But by filtering content that you see and narrowing its focus, it significantly alters whatever the standard distribution of news stories is by zeroing in on what most people are interested in. Do this enough, and nobody ever sees information about a lesser-known candidate, even if that candidate is in media sources and people write on the web about him/her, because Google "knows" that you are most interested in the better-known candidates, based on your previous search behavior. And because you live in a certain region, perhaps you see information about political issues A and B, but almost nothing about C and D, since people in your region don't seem to like clicking on stuff about C and D.

Just because Google doesn't tweak its algorithms because of individual complaints doesn't mean they couldn't result in a significant bias or manipulation (even if unintentional) in the way people vote.

It's always manipulating the results....

[Gorkamecha]

It's always manipulating the results....by design. Google will show you the links that it thinks the majority of people are looking for, based on your search term. It might even adjust them a bit if it knows more about you. So if I'm a minority candidate in an election, with a weak online campaign, there is a chance my content is filtered out simply because Google thinks I'm noise. Or I'm pushed several pages down in the listings. As a person using google, I can tweak my search to find better results, but only if I know the results are there to find." What color of lipstick does Trinity wear in the matrix" will get me a vastly different answer from "What color lipstick do movie stars wear?" Same for politics - "What candidate supports gun control" will get you a different result from "What candidate is looking to limit the caliber of rifles to .22". Both could get me a politician, but the first is going to get me a far more generic "popular" link then the much more specific second. And if I don't know I'm looking for the second guy, I might stop at the first.

Re:It's always manipulating the results....

[u38cg]

Google probably weights your search reults more by what it knows about you than anything else. For instance, I play the bagpipes and searching for anything with the term "pipe" in it doesn't result in plumbing results. Of course, if you're a bagpipe-playing plumber, you're in trouble...

Re:Remind me again...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Many forms of Government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." -Winston Churchill

Re:Doesn't Google tailor search results?

[AthanasiusKircher]

I thought part of the point of Google tracking you was that they could tailor search results (and ads of course) to your interests. So Google finds you're interested in Ron Paul, and gives you more stuff about Ron Paul.

Yes, absolutely. And some people -- probably most people -- would find that useful. Most people love to hear about things that agree with them or that they're interested in, which is why they subscribe to some extreme Socialist newsletter or some Libertarian magazine.

There are two problems with Google, though: (1) it doesn't make the process transparent: most people don't even realize this is happening, and (2) there is no way to control the process and tweak it according to your preferences. To take another example, I have no problem if Netflix makes suggestions to me according to movies I had previously rated, but it also allows me to tell it that I really want to see lots of westerns but no thrillers or whatever. Similarly, I can subscribe or unsubscribe from whatever wacko political newsletter I want -- but Google doesn't give me any options if I decide I want to change how it decides to rank things to deliver a "personalized" experience for me.

Of course, it is unlikely that Google would allow users to tweak their preferences, because it would reveal too much about how their search algorithms and customizations work... as well as potentially undermining the data they gather. But if they don't do that, there should at least be a prominent checkbox right on the homepage that says, "Don't personalize my results" (maybe with a few other options that allow limited personalization or some choices).

I don't have a problem with Google showing me more about Ron Paul if I'm actually interested in Ron Paul. But I have a bigger problem if I ended up seeing Ron Paul links for weeks or months or years (how do we know, since we don't know how Google's personalization algorithms work?) because I happened to read up on some content for a few days or weeks... maybe I was writing an article related to him or something, but I'm actually not interested in seeing more about him at all. Or... well, any of a number of other explanations. But I'm stuck with whatever black box customization Google forces on me.

And, of course, that larger issue isn't even that Google might show me more of what I might want to read -- it's what gets thrown out of the top few pages of hits to make room for that stuff. I don't want a feedback loop where the internet keeps agreeing with me. I want to encounter people and ideas and concepts that DISAGREE with me, so I can learn from them. Most people don't necessarily want that -- but we as a society should be concerned when it becomes more difficult to come into contact with contrasting perspectives, since it leads to narrow-mindedness and increasing disconnects with reality.

Yes! (I googled it)

[formfeed]

I just googled "Can Google Influence Elections?" -
Four of the top five hits are certain that it can (the other one is slashdot).

That's alarming. I didn't know that before I googled it.