And while there’s no question that he benefited tremendously from being the mainstream media’s favorite son, Big Tech may have helped him even more.
Dr. Robert Epstein, a senior research psychologist for the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology in California, is an expert on Big Tech’s influence on politics who has long been warning about how Silicon Valley could steal the election.
In an interview with Tucker Carlson about a year ago, he cautioned: “Google and similar companies like Facebook are completely unregulated in the United States, so they can do whatever they please. And if they all work together in 2020 to support the same presidential candidate, which is very likely – and probably it will be a candidate that I support, by the way – they can shift upwards of 15 million votes with no one knowing that they’ve been manipulated and without leaving a paper trail for authorities to trace.”
And now it looks like his prediction was right. This time around, Dr. Epstein’s team enlisted the help of 733 field agents in three swing states – Florida, North Carolina and Arizona – who analyzed more than half a million ephemeral experiences. This includes search results, reminders on the homepages of Google and Facebook, news feeds, YouTube sequences and search suggestions. These types of fleeting content influence people when they are displayed before disappearing forever without a trace.
Dr. Epstein reported that the search results in Google were “strongly biased” in favor of liberals, which is something that wasn’t seen in rivals such as Yahoo! and Bing. This bias was shown to all demographics, including conservatives, who actually got even more liberally biased results than those with Democrat leanings.
However, for him, the smoking gun was the behavior of Google’s vote reminder. For a period of days, he says, the reminder to vote on Google’s home page was only shown to liberals; not a single one of their conservative field agents got the reminder during those days. On the day that they went public with some of these findings, Google backed off and started showing it to all voters.
He thinks these manipulations may have shifted at least 6 million votes in one direction – which, by the way, is roughly the margin of the election. He said whistleblowers and leaked internal documents made it clear that Google set out to ensure Trump would not be re-elected after he originally took office, and the data they’ve collected backs that up.
In an interview with the Epoch Times’ American Thought Leaders program, Dr. Epstein explained that even though he’s a Democrat and his party benefited from all this, he felt compelled to speak out about it because it goes against the spirit of democracy: “I lean left, myself, I think it’s great that they’re pushing causes and candidates that I like, and that my family likes,” he admitted.
“But, you know, I put democracy and I put the free and fair election, I put our country ahead of any personal preferences I might have for a candidate or a party. And the fact is if we allow companies like Google to control the outcome of our elections, then we have no democracy, there is no free and fair election, all of that is illusory,” he added.
Would anyone even be surprised if Google gives conservatives inaccurate information regarding where to vote, their polling place's hours, and anything else that might keep them from casting their vote next time around?
Sources for this article include: