Source: rwmalonemd.substack.com
We hear a lot about “election integrity” or lack thereof, particularly around the issues of counting the vote and the ballot box. But the truth is that elections are more likely to be stolen via search engine manipulation effects (SEME).
What is SEME?
SEME is an abbreviation for the search engine manipulation effect. In a series of randomized controlled experiments, it has been shown that more than 20% of undecided voters can be manipulated into voting one way or the other, by simply manipulating the rankings of search engine results.
These studies were published in an article titled “The search engine manipulation effect (SEME) and its possible impact on the outcomes of elections”, which was published in the journal, PNAS in 2015. From the paper:
Internet search rankings have a significant impact on consumer choices, mainly because users trust and choose higher-ranked results more than lower-ranked results. Given the apparent power of search rankings, we asked whether they could be manipulated to alter the preferences of undecided voters in democratic elections.
Here we report the results of five relevant double-blind, randomized controlled experiments, using a total of 4,556 undecided voters representing diverse demographic characteristics of the voting populations of the United States and India. The fifth experiment is especially notable in that it was conducted with eligible voters throughout India in the midst of India’s 2014 Lok Sabha elections just before the final votes were cast.
The results of these experiments demonstrate that (i) biased search rankings can shift the voting preferences of undecided voters by 20% or more, (ii) the shift can be much higher in some demographic groups, and (iii) search ranking bias can be masked so that people show no awareness of the manipulation.
We call this type of influence, which might be applicable to a variety of attitudes and beliefs, the search engine manipulation effect. Given that many elections are won by small margins, our results suggest that a search engine company has the power to influence the results of a substantial number of elections with impunity. The impact of such manipulations would be especially large in countries dominated by a single search engine company.
The principle investigator of these studies has gone on to show that the 2016, 2020 and 2022 elections were all manipulated by Google. After Hillary Clinton’s loss in 2016, which shocked Google leadership, internal whistleblowers revealed that Google vowed that it wouldn’t happen again. Which is why Trump “lost” in 2020.
One of the most chilling interviews I recently listened was on the Bill Walton Show. Bill is a personal friend, and together with another friend (Jenny Beth Martin) interviewed Dr. Epstein (the PI and author of the above paper) in 2023.
Below are some of the more important portions of that interview (the full transcript can be found here).
Robert Epstein: Google is actually surveilling you and your kids and your loved ones on over more than 200 different platforms, most of which people have not heard of. So, quick example, most websites, millions of websites use Google Analytics to track traffic to their website…
If you are using a Google service such as Google Analytics, then they have a right to track you. So, in other words, on all of those websites that use Google Analytics, which Google provides for free to companies around the world, if you visit any of those websites, Google is tracking every single thing you do on those websites. So, there are actually more than 200 different ways in which they’re tracking us. They bought Fitbit a few years ago, so that gives them physiological data 24 hours a day. About seven, eight years ago, they bought the Nest Smart Thermostat company, and the first thing they did after they started making smart thermostats was they put microphones in them.
But the point is they did this without telling anyone. At the time, they also were filing for patents on how to interpret sounds inside the home, so they could tell whether the kids are okay, whether your sex life is okay. They literally got patents on methods for interpreting sound inside homes.
Bill Walton: we’re talking about Google and Google’s omnipotence and ability to monitor and manipulate. Let’s talk about the people in Google. I’d like to put a human face on it because people in Google, what’s the culture of Google? We got Sergey Brin and the other fellow is … Larry Page, who actually met 12 years ago when they were children, but they were billionaire children. But what’s the culture like and has that changed in the 12, 10 years since you started following and getting into the Google world?
Robert Epstein: Well, first of all, as you know, as a former corporate executive, corporations have a culture and some have very distinctive cultures. Google’s is extremely distinctive. 96% of the donations of Google employees go to Democrats, which again, I’m all for that, but the point is it’s very homogeneous culture leans extremely left and the two founders are utopians. Now, that’s a problem, because it means you’re going to be hiring people who think like you do. It also means that in your mind, you know what’s best for the world. One of the fascinating items… an eight- minute video leaked from their advanced products division a couple of years ago, it’s called the Selfish Ledger. It was never meant to be seen outside the company. If you look online, look up the Selfish Ledger and then put my name next to it, you’ll get a detailed transcript with my annotations on it. This video is about the company’s ability to re-engineer humanity according to… I kid you not. It’s right in the video. … company values. So, their culture is very, very strong. It’s very utopian. “We know best. We are going to remake the world. We are going to reshape kids around the world”
Which is one of the things that now my research is looking at directly, is that indoctrination problem. We are going to put into office people we think should be in office, not just in the US but around the world. We are going to impact the thinking and behavior and emotions of right now, more than 4 billion people around the world the way we want to, generally speaking, without anyone knowing what we’re doing and generally speaking, without leaving a paper trail.
It’s gone way past experimentation because they have mastered techniques, which I’ve been discovering and naming and identifying and quantifying over the years, but they’ve mastered techniques which they use without any constraint. They use them to impact our kids. They use them to impact our elections. They use them to impact decisions that pretty much everyone makes, especially if you’re using a lot of Google services, which I think you are.
If you’ve been using the internet for 20 years, which probably the people at this table have been, they have the equivalent of more than three million pages of information about you.
But it’s very easy to switch off of Gmails. So, this is a little footnote, I guess, on our larger discussion, but it’s worth bringing up. You can set your Gmail to forward emails that are coming in. What you want to do is set it to forward to your new Proton Mail account. You can sign up for Proton Mail in seconds because they don’t ask you anything about yourself because they don’t survive off of surveillance. They’re based in Switzerland. They’re subject to very strict Swiss privacy laws. They use end-to-end encryption. So, if you’re writing from Proton Mail to Proton Mail, no one can see that message. Not even the people at Proton Mail.
At Google, it’s just the opposite. Thousands of employees at Google have free access to your entire profile, your whole search history, all the emails you’ve ever written. Nothing within that company is encrypted because they’re so focused on speed, so they don’t encrypt anything. Once you set up that forwarding from your Gmail, everything’s coming in now to your new Proton Mail. So, you’re checking your Proton Mail, now you’re replying from Proton Mail, so everyone immediately gets your new email address. You don’t lose any of that. Your old archive of emails on Gmail is still there for you.
They never erase anything. They do, however, cut people off sometimes from their Gmails. They’ve done that to millions of people. You’ve probably heard of Jordan Peterson as a colleague of mine, psychologist up in Canada. He’s one of millions of people who has been completely cut off from his accounts. When they cut you off from Gmail, they cut you off from all of your accounts. They can do this with or without cause. They have no customer service department.
Walton: Google’s a private company.
Robert Epstein: That’s right.
Bill Walton: No shareholders. I mean no public shareholders. So, the two young men, not so young now, control the company. A fair number of venture capitalists from Silicon Valley still got big stakes in Google. Of course, the venture capitalists in Silicon Valley share the values of the founders, don’t they?
Robert Epstein: But see, two of the key funders who really got them going, one is Roger McNamee, another is Jaron Lanier. They’re both billionaire tech guys… each of those has come out with public statements and each of them in the last few years has come out with a book. They’ve each written a book saying that if they had known what was going to happen to Google and Facebook, which they both invested in the early days, they would never have invested in those companies. These are very dangerous companies, especially for democracy. So, here are two of the biggest investors in these companies that got them going saying they have turned into monsters. So, it’s not just me. There are people who are in the know, who really understand from the inside what’s going on and who are terrified.
Robert Epstein: Okay, first of all, you think of Gmail like it’s the United States Postal Service, right?
But it’s not. The US Postal Service, they actually do preserve your privacy unless they get a court order and they also have to deliver the mail. They must deliver the mail. Okay. So, Gmail pretends it’s a free postal service, except they’re not subject to any rules or regulations of any sort, and they don’t have to deliver your mail. If they want to, they can take millions of emails coming, let’s say, from the Republican Party that are going out to constituents and they can send them right into people’s spam boxes. So, no one ever sees those. In fact, the RNC sued Google last year, because in fact, they were doing just that.
They don’t have to deliver mail. They can alter mail, believe it or not. Then of course, there’s the surveillance. They read your emails. The Postal Service doesn’t read everyone’s emails and put all the information into everyone’s profiles, but we’re talking about massive surveillance on the one hand.
Number two, we’re talking about massive censorship. A big article I wrote for US News and World Report a few years ago was on nine of Google’s blacklists. I had never seen them, but I knew as a programmer that they existed. I described them in detail. They deny having blacklists. When I testified before Congress in 2019, right before me, Google executive was asked under oath, “Sir, does Google have blacklists?”He said, under oath, “No, Senator, we do not.” A few weeks later, a Google whistleblower walked out of Google. His name is Zach Vorhies who I’ve gotten to know very well over the years. He walks out with 950 pages of documents from Google, three of which are labeled blacklists. I mean, talk about the arrogance of this company. Would you label your blacklist blacklists? Because I wouldn’t. But the point is, of course, they have blacklists. A lot of the entities listed on those lists were conservative organizations or conservative personalities. So, again, they have very, very, very strong corporate culture, and they suppress content that they don’t want people to see. So, you’ve got the surveillance, number one. Number two, massive censorship. Then number three, which is what I started studying more than 10 years ago, manipulation techniques. They have access to techniques of manipulation, which have never existed before in human history. They’re made possible by the internet. Unfortunately, they’re controlled almost entirely by a couple of tech monopolies.
What’s wrong with that? What’s wrong with that is if let’s say you’re running a political campaign and you put up a billboard, well, I can put up a billboard across the street and counter your billboard. You buy a TV commercial. I can buy another TV commercial. In other words, a lot of what happens in elections or for that matter in life is competitive.
That’s a good part of democracy is that competitiveness. But if Google itself wants to support a party or a candidate using one of these new techniques that we study, there’s nothing you can do. Generally speaking, you can’t even see what they’re doing. Even if you could, you have no way to counteract it. They can implement those techniques free of charge to them, costs them nothing, and they can implement them on a massive scale, not just around this country, but around the world. They do. They do this strategically and deliberately every single day. There is no one stopping them. There are no relevant regulations or laws. They have absolute free hand.
(Personally) Well, I’ve got more than pushback. I mean, I’ve paid a price. I was contacted by a DC journalist a couple of years ago. He was doing a piece about my work, and he said that he was going to try to get comments from Google. Calls me up a couple days later, said he had talked to a woman who he believed was the head of their PR department. He said, “And she screamed at me when I asked her questions about your work.” He said, “I’ve never seen that before. It’s very unprofessional.” He said, “Based on what she was saying, I want to tell you two things. Number one, you’ve got their attention. Number two, if I were you, I would take precautions.”
Now, summer of 2019, I had been working with AGs since 2015, but that particular summer, I gave a private briefing to a bunch of AGs. It was at Stanford University. I scared the heck out of everyone, lots and lots of detail, lots of tough questions. Went out into the lobby when I was done. Little while later, the meeting breaks up. One of these AGs, I know exactly who it was, he walked up to me, he said, “Dr. Epstein, I don’t want to scare you.” He said, “But based on what you’ve told us, I’m predicting that you’re going to be killed in some accident in the next few months.” Now, I wasn’t killed, but my wife was. I’m still struggling with that, but there have been other incidents since then….