Psychologist Dr. Robert Epstein appeared on SiriusXM Patriot’s Breitbart News Sunday to discuss Google’s power and influence over public opinion and voting patterns with Breitbart News Deputy political editor Amanda House.
On the topic of a recent report which claimed Google employees spoke about burying conservative websites such as Breitbart and the Daily Caller in an effort to “reverse things in four years,” Epstein declared, “It’s just another indication, Amanda, of what a lot of us have suspected for a long time. It just confirms based on actual communications within the company that Google has the power to shift the votes and opinions on anything, and they discuss the power. They wouldn’t discuss it if they didn’t have it, and they exercise the power. There’s simply no question about that.”
“We’ve seen a number of leaks in the last couple of months. Before that, for almost twenty years, Google was very good at keeping its secrets. But lately we’ve been seeing what things look like from the inside, and it’s pretty scary,” Epstein continued. “There’s lots of research now showing that in fact we trust the information we get from algorithms, like Google search algorithms, more than we trust any other media source because people don’t understand what an algorithm is and they think that, you know, it’s a computer algorithm showing this information, it must be the best. It must be correct.”
“And that’s why in our experiments, some of them show that you can use Google search results to shift people’s opinions and voting preferences by up to eighty percent in some demographic groups, and by the way, the most vulnerable demographic group we’ve ever found in the U.S. is moderate Republicans,” he explained. “They’re incredibly trusting of Google search results.”
After being asked if he found any Google search irregularities during the Midterm elections, Epstein replied, “I can tell you now, on the record… Yes, I did. I did this secretly in 2016, capturing around 13,000 election-related searches on Google, Bing, and Yahoo, and this time I captured about 40,000 election-related searches on Google, Bing, and Yahoo, so yes I did.”
Noting that he isn’t a political conservative, Epstein concluded by stating that concerns over Google’s power are “bigger than one’s politics.”
“Whatever Google happens to be doing today, whoever they happen to be favoring today, they might not favor tomorrow,” Epstein concluded. “We all need to be concerned about one company having this much power to shape opinions and flip elections, and without them being accountable to the public, without them being constrained in any way by any regulations or laws. That’s my concern. I think it’s bigger than one’s politics… This is a concern we should all share.”
Charlie Nash is a reporter for Breitbart Tech. You can follow him on Twitter @MrNashington, or like his page at Facebook.
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