March 8, 2016 at 15:20Study: Google can choose the president of the USA by changing search engine results
Since 2013, American psychologist Robert Epstein has been conducting research in the United States and India in order to find out how issuing a Google search engine can affect people's political preferences. The result - manipulating Google’s issuance can change US voters' preferences by up to 80%. In fact, if necessary and desired, Google can choose the new president of the United States.
Half of the clicks in the search are in the first two lines of the results. 90% on the first ten lines. Google is a leader in the search engine market, and the company, using a ranking system, decides how to arrange each of the billions of pages in the search results.
Robert Epstein thought that the top lines would not greatly influence people's political preferences. But it turned out thatissuing a search engine can increase the desire to vote for a particular candidate by 48% . At the same time, three quarters of the subjects did not know that they saw the changed results of the extradition.
Epstein conducted several experiments , one of which was attended by two thousand people from fifty states. In some demographic groups, the manipulation of voters reached 80%: that is, 8 out of 10 people who saw certain results in the extradition would vote for the right candidate.
Then Epstein decided to check whether it is possible to manipulate votes in the middle of a real election race, when candidates are throwing people from all sides with PR? To do this, the team went to India - to the election of the Prime Minister. Scientists have hired 2,150 people over 27 from 35 Indian states. To take part in the study, these people had to be registered as voters, but had not yet cast their vote and made a decision.
Epstein thought that manipulating the issue would have little effect, if at all, in some way affect the choice, when candidates try to use all possible channels to get votes. But he was wrong again: on average, people preferred a given candidate 20% more often, and for certain demographic groups this result was 60%.
And now - a few words for lovers of world conspiracies. Drive “The Groundwork” into Google, click on the first line and you will see such a page . According to experts from the US Democratic Party, this project is a startup of Alphabet CEO Eric Schmidt , designed to make Hillary Clinton president.
Half of the clicks in the search are in the first two lines of the results. 90% on the first ten lines. Google is a leader in the search engine market, and the company, using a ranking system, decides how to arrange each of the billions of pages in the search results.
Robert Epstein thought that the top lines would not greatly influence people's political preferences. But it turned out thatissuing a search engine can increase the desire to vote for a particular candidate by 48% . At the same time, three quarters of the subjects did not know that they saw the changed results of the extradition.
Epstein conducted several experiments , one of which was attended by two thousand people from fifty states. In some demographic groups, the manipulation of voters reached 80%: that is, 8 out of 10 people who saw certain results in the extradition would vote for the right candidate.
Then Epstein decided to check whether it is possible to manipulate votes in the middle of a real election race, when candidates are throwing people from all sides with PR? To do this, the team went to India - to the election of the Prime Minister. Scientists have hired 2,150 people over 27 from 35 Indian states. To take part in the study, these people had to be registered as voters, but had not yet cast their vote and made a decision.
Epstein thought that manipulating the issue would have little effect, if at all, in some way affect the choice, when candidates try to use all possible channels to get votes. But he was wrong again: on average, people preferred a given candidate 20% more often, and for certain demographic groups this result was 60%.
We found something important, given Google’s dominance in the search engine market. Google has almost a monopoly in the search engine market in the US - it is used by 83% of Americans according to the Pew Research Center. So if Google stands for one candidate in the election, its influence on undecided users can easily decide the outcome of the vote.
And now - a few words for lovers of world conspiracies. Drive “The Groundwork” into Google, click on the first line and you will see such a page . According to experts from the US Democratic Party, this project is a startup of Alphabet CEO Eric Schmidt , designed to make Hillary Clinton president.