Ensuring the demise of our democratic constitutional republic!

In American Greatness, Ned Ryun informs us.

Last week, mostly lost in the news cycle of Trump versus “the squad” and the anticipation of the Mueller hearings, was the testimony of Dr. Robert Epstein in front of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution regarding the power of Google to manipulate elections. Epstein, a Harvard Ph.D. in psychology and behavioral sciences, is a Democrat who voted for Clinton in 2016. Yet what he testified to should be troubling to every American who is concerned about election integrity and the threats of manipulation by powers both foreign and domestic.

Epstein testified, based on 13,000 saved search results of American citizens and dozens of controlled experiments in the United States and abroad, that the power of the Search Engine Manipulation Effect (SEME) generated by Google’s search algorithm likely impacted undecided voters in a way that gave at least 2.6 million votes to Hillary Clinton in 2016. Epstein explained:

SEME is one of the most powerful forms of influence ever discovered in the behavioral sciences, and it is especially dangerous because it is invisible to people—“subliminal,” in effect. It leaves people thinking they have made up their own minds, which is very much an illusion. It also leaves no paper trail for authorities to trace. Worse still, the very few people who can detect bias in search results shift even farther in the direction of the bias, so merely being able to see the bias doesn’t protect you from it. Bottom line: biased search results can easily produce shifts in the opinions and voting preference of undecided voters by 20 percent or more—up to 80 percent in some demographic groups.

In January 2013, while sitting at Google’s political innovation summit in New York City, it became very clear to me that Google would have the power to influence and affect the outcomes of national elections. According to Epstein, “Google has likely been determining the outcomes of upwards of 25 percent of the national elections worldwide since at least 2015.”

But it becomes even more troubling when Epstein discussed the potential impact that Google, combined with Facebook and Twitter, could have on the election outcomes in 2020. “Big Tech in 2020, because if these companies all support the same candidate—and that’s likely, needless to say—they will be able to shift upwards of 15 million votes to that candidate with no one knowing and without leaving a paper trail,” Epstein said.

After six years of studying Google, Epstein’s solution for breaking up Google’s SEME is to make its index public, to make it into a sort of public commons to engender greater competition. I have argued that these tech companies must have their Section 230 exemptions removed and be redefined as publishers and telecommunications companies. And we have antitrust laws for a reason. The federal government has a role in breaking up what are, in fact, monopolies.

Whatever the solution may be—and I suspect it is a combination of all of the above—it’s time to get aggressive. Addressing the power of the tech companies is a winning issue with Americans across the ideological spectrum. We can hope more of our elected officials will follow the lead of Senators Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and Mark Warner (D-Va.) and find the courage to rise to the occasion. Because to sit and dither, to listen to the various tech collaborators on the right mumbling about “free market” solutions, is to ensure the demise of our democratic constitutional republic.

Read more here.