Is Google search bias a real thing? One expert says it is — and it could have given Hillary Clinton up to 10 million votes in the 2016 ele...
Is Google search bias a real thing? One expert says it is — and it could have given Hillary Clinton up to 10 million votes in the 2016 election.
As Newsbusters reported, Wednesday was the day that the Senate Judiciary Committee decided to address the thorny topic of potential bias from the world’s largest search engine. The hearing, “Google and Censorship through Search Engines,” was predictably a contentious affair.
The headline-maker from the event was Sen. Ted Cruz.
The Texas Republican grilled Karan Bhatia, Google’s vice president for government affairs & public policy, over internal documents that said “tech firms have gradually shifted away from unmediated free speech and toward censorship and moderation.” (Bhatia, for his part, said that the document was an example of marketing team brainstorming and not official company policy.)
For those concerned about big tech and its political influence, however, the most frightening bit of testimony might have come from Dr. Robert Epstein, a senior researcher at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology.
Epstein, an expert on Google, said he felt that “upwards of 15 million votes” were potentially at stake during the 2020 election due to Google’s policies.
During questioning by Cruz, Epstein said that “through bias and search results,” the tech giant had delivered millions of votes to the Democratic candidate in the 2016 election, as well.
When asked to elaborate how many votes this entailed, the number was quite high — up to 10 million and more, Epstein said.
“The range is between 2.6 and 10.4 million votes depending on how aggressive they were in using the techniques that I’ve been studying, such as the search engine manipulation effect, the search suggestion effect, the answer bot effect, and a number of others,” he said.
“They control these and no one can counteract them. These are not competitive. These are tools that they have at their disposal exclusively.”
Video below. (The exchange in question begins at about 5:30):