A senior research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology, in California, Dr. Robert Epstein has been researching and looking at how the biggest tech companies influence human behavior, and conducting extensive monitoring projects of bias in these companies’ products, with a particular focus on Google.
Epstein called his findings “frightening” because of the Tech companies’ ability to manipulate and change people’s behavior on a global scale.
“Now, put that all together, you’ve got something that’s frightening, because you have sources of influence, controlled by really a handful of executives who are not accountable to any public, not the American public, not any public anywhere. They’re only accountable to their shareholders,” Epstein told host of American Thought Leaders Jan Jekielek during a recent interview.
“And yet, they hold in their hands, the power to change thinking behavior on a massive scale, the power in close elections anyway, to pick the winner in the country after country after country.”
Epstein said that Google’s search engine shifted between 2.6 and 10.4 million votes to Hillary Clinton, over a period of months before the 2016 election, and later shifted at least 6 million votes to Joe Biden and other Democrats.
“We calculated at one point that as of 2015, upwards of 25 percent of the national elections in the world, were being controlled being determined by Google’s search algorithm.”
Epstein is making these comments after conducting rigorous studies, spanning almost a decade, and managing to document ephemeral experiences of manipulation on Google and other companies’ platforms.