Is Google Hacking Its Users' Brains To Vote For Clinton?

[g5000]

How the internet flips elections and alters our thou...

A fascinating article, especially considering Google's executives donated $800,000 to Obama in 2012, and only $37,000 to Romney.

 

[g5000]

Does the company ever favour particular candidates? In the 2012 US presidential election, Google and its top executives donated more than $800,000 to President Barack Obama and just $37,000 to his opponent, Mitt Romney. And in 2015, a team of researchers from the University of Maryland and elsewhere showed that Google’s search results routinely favoured Democratic candidates. Are Google’s search rankings really biased? An internal reportissued by the US Federal Trade Commission in 2012 concluded that Google’s search rankings routinely put Google’s financial interests ahead of those of their competitors, and anti-trust actions currently under way against Google in both the European Union and India are based on similar findings.

 

[g5000]

Google decides which web pages to include in search results, and how to rank them.

That ordered list is so good, in fact, that about 50 per cent of our clicks go to the top two items, and more than 90 per cent of our clicks go to the 10 items listed on the first page of results.

You can see where this could lead, if you want to push your users toward a particular candidate. The authors of this essay performed experiments in India and found they could take Undecided voters and get up to 60 percent of them to become favorable toward a particular candidate by exploiting the search results they get.

On average, we were able to shift the proportion of people favouring any given candidate by more than 20 per cent overall and more than 60 per cent in some demographic groups. Even more disturbing, 99.5 per cent of our participants showed no awareness that they were viewing biased search rankings – in other words, that they were being manipulated.

 

[g5000]

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.

We now estimate that Hannon’s old friends have the power to drive between 2.6 and 10.4 million votes to Clinton on election day with no one knowing that this is occurring and without leaving a paper trail.

 

[g5000]

The Groundwork

 

[Moonglow]

Nope, not working here, Hillary is still a wretched puke in my brain...

 

[g5000]

Nope, not working here, Hillary is still a wretched puke in my brain...

It's the Undecideds who are vulnerable to manipulation. Not die hard partisans.

Then again, Project Groundwork may not have started yet. So in a few months, you may be crying like a teenaged girl at a One Direction concert every time you see Hillary's face on TV.

Be careful what you look for!

 

[Moonglow]

Nope, not working here, Hillary is still a wretched puke in my brain...

It's the Undecideds who are vulnerable to manipulation. Not die hard partisans.

Then again, Project Groundwork may not have started yet. So in a few months, you may be crying like a teenaged girl at a One Direction concert every time you see Hillary's face on TV.

Be careful what you look for!

Not until the code phase has been stated..

 

[g5000]

Nope, not working here, Hillary is still a wretched puke in my brain...

It's the Undecideds who are vulnerable to manipulation. Not die hard partisans.

Then again, Project Groundwork may not have started yet. So in a few months, you may be crying like a teenaged girl at a One Direction concert every time you see Hillary's face on TV.

Be careful what you look for!

Not until the code phase has been stated..

GOOGLE: Why don't you pass the time by playing a little solitaire?

MOONGLOW: Hillary Clinton is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I've ever known in my life.

 

[Moonglow]

Nope, not working here, Hillary is still a wretched puke in my brain...

It's the Undecideds who are vulnerable to manipulation. Not die hard partisans.

Then again, Project Groundwork may not have started yet. So in a few months, you may be crying like a teenaged girl at a One Direction concert every time you see Hillary's face on TV.

Be careful what you look for!

Not until the code phase has been stated..

GOOGLE: Why don't you pass the time by playing a little solitaire?

MOONGLOW: Hillary Clinton is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I've ever known in my life.

It bores me to tears....

 

[C_Clayton_Jones]

Google decides which web pages to include in search results, and how to rank them.

That ordered list is so good, in fact, that about 50 per cent of our clicks go to the top two items, and more than 90 per cent of our clicks go to the 10 items listed on the first page of results.

You can see where this could lead, if you want to push your users toward a particular candidate. The authors of this essay performed experiments in India and found they could take Undecided voters and get up to 60 percent of them to become favorable toward a particular candidate by exploiting the search results they get.

On average, we were able to shift the proportion of people favouring any given candidate by more than 20 per cent overall and more than 60 per cent in some demographic groups. Even more disturbing, 99.5 per cent of our participants showed no awareness that they were viewing biased search rankings – in other words, that they were being manipulated.

And your solution is what...

Absent any solutions, then, we're all been warned, for all the good it will do.

 

[C_Clayton_Jones]

“Fortunately, all of these sources of influence operate competitively. Some of the persuaders want us to buy or believe one thing, others to buy or believe something else. It is the competitive nature of our society that keeps us, on balance, relatively free.

But what would happen if new sources of control began to emerge that had little or no competition? And what if new means of control were developed that were far more powerful – and far more invisible – than any that have existed in the past? And what if new types of control allowed a handful of people to exert enormous influence not just over the citizens of the US but over most of the people on Earth?”

What if people could write without committing speculation and slippery slope fallacies – what if Eleanor Roosevelt could fly...

This illustrates well the fundamental wisdom of Citizens United, and the fundamental truth that is its foundation: that it's ultimately the sole responsibility of each voter to research the issues and candidates, to base their votes on that research, and reject attack ads, partisan demagoguery, and 'internet mind control' to cast ballots in accordance with the facts and the truth.

And if voters are too lazy or stupid or apathetic to do the needed research, allowing themselves to be unduly influenced by 'internet mind control' and the like, then that's a problem far more serious than any government regulation might solve, whether that regulation is Constitutional or not.

 

[Dont Taz Me Bro]

It's not really a secret that Silicon Valley is bastion of liberalism, particularly among those who work in the tech industry. It is ironic, though, to listen to them whine and cry about how the poor are hurting the rich when they're making it nearly impossible for anyone with less than a six figure income to live anywhere in the Bay area.