Search Engine Elections

Whenever I watch students use Google I cringe. They type in questions like they were talking (i.e "What is purpose of utilitarianism?"), they have no idea how to use modifiers like 'NOT', 'site:' or 'ext:', and they randomly click on one of the top 5 entries without a second's regard. Google is powerful and this is why it needs to be distrusted. This article is the best summary of how some social scientists have tested and confirmed just how powerful this effect is.

https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-internet-flips-elections-and-alters-our-thoughts

Using rigged search results given to test populations, these scientists were able to profoundly shift the population's preference to whatever candidate showed up highest in the search results. For the most suggestible populations up to 80%-90% of voting preference was decided by search engine results. The effect was almost subliminal as few subjects tied together their new preferences with search rank order.

aeon.co wrote:In most countries, 90 per cent of online search is conducted on Google, which gives the company even more power to flip elections than it has in the US and, with internet penetration increasing rapidly worldwide, this power is growing. In our PNAS article, Robertson and I calculated that Google now has the power to flip upwards of 25 per cent of the national elections in the world with no one knowing this is occurring. In fact, we estimate that, with or without deliberate planning on the part of company executives, Google’s search rankings have been impacting elections for years, with growing impact each year. And because search rankings are ephemeral, they leave no paper trail, which gives the company complete deniability.

They figure that this means in the 2016 US election, Google will have about 3 - 10 million voters it controls. Voter turnout in the USA is about 80 - 130 million.

aeon.co wrote:A study by Robert M Bond, now a political science professor at Ohio State University, and others published in Nature in 2012 described an ethically questionable experiment in which, on election day in 2010, Facebook sent ‘go out and vote’ reminders to more than 60 million of its users. The reminders caused about 340,000 people to vote who otherwise would not have.

Writing in the New Republic in 2014, Jonathan Zittrain, professor of international law at Harvard University, pointed out that, given the massive amount of information it has collected about its users, Facebook could easily send such messages only to people who support one particular party or candidate, and that doing so could easily flip a close election – with no one knowing that this has occurred. And because advertisements, like search rankings, are ephemeral, manipulating an election in this way would leave no paper trail.

The real reason I'm recommending this article is because unlike many cowardly social sceintist, the writier is not afraid to connect his finding to the real world of power and politics.

Looking ahead to the November 2016 US presidential election, I see clear signs that Google is backing Hillary Clinton. In April 2015, Clinton hired Stephanie Hannon away from Google to be her chief technology officer and, a few months ago, Eric Schmidt, chairman of the holding company that controls Google, set up a semi-secret company – The Groundwork – for the specific purpose of putting Clinton in office. The formation of The Groundwork prompted Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks, to dub Google Clinton’s ‘secret weapon’ in her quest for the US presidency.

And one final quote from a related article on that same website about the danger of 'addictive websites':

A handful of corporations determine the basic shape of the web that most of us use every day. Many of those companies make money by capturing users’ attention, and turning it into pageviews and clicks. They’ve staked their futures on methods to cultivate habits in users, in order to win as much of that attention as possible. Successful companies build specialised teams and collect reams of personalised data, all intended to hook users on their products.

‘Much as a user might need to exercise willpower, responsibility and self-control, and that’s great, we also have to acknowledge the other side of the street,’ said Tristan Harris, an ethical design proponent who works at Google. (He spoke outside his role at the search giant.) Major tech companies, Harris told me, ‘have 100 of the smartest statisticians and computer scientists, who went to top schools, whose job it is to break your willpower.’

The only thing to add is that it is not just "smartest statisticians and computer scientist" who are hired to make you watch ads and become addicted to websites but it is also sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists, graphic designers, sophists (aka dark-side philosophers), communication experts, geo-mappers, neurologists, ethologists, ect.... A sizable chuck of the humanities/social sciences are bought up by corporations and weaponized against the population to get them to buy, watch, believe what a certain corporation wants them to.

GodMoney doesn't want everything - it wants it ALL.