In an interview on the Glenn Beck Show on Monday, Dr. Robert Epstein laid out a doomsday scenario: big tech executives at Google and other popular sites, apoplectic at the election of Donald Trump in 2016, vowed never to let it happen again. In fact, his research shows that search engine manipulation could shift as many as 20% of votes from one candidate to another in a given election. That’s why Dr. Epstein recently wrote, and repeated Monday,
No matter which weak candidate the Democrats ultimately nominate, and even with Russia’s help, President Donald Trump can’t win the 2020 election. For that matter, in races nationwide in which the projected winning margins are small—say, under 5 percent or so—Republicans, in general, are likely to lose.
This claim continues the chorus of whistleblowers, leaked emails,Senate hearings, and academic research showing the power of the search engine manipulation effect. Epstein warns that this is only one technique Big Tech uses to manipulate voters.
Epstein used the example of Google temporarily changing its logo on Election Day 2018 to Go Vote. He remarked that it received public praise for its civic mindedness, but Google had an ulterior motive. Knowing that their target demographic leans Left, a vote reminder may have influenced 800,000 more Democratic voters than Republicans to turn in their ballots. Democrats took over the House of Representatives, and we may never know how much digital manipulation led to that result.
Remember, Epstein has repeatedly stated that he is a Democrat and Hillary voter. He loves his country more:
For the record, I’m neither a conservative nor a Trump supporter. But I love democracy and America more than I love any particular party or candidate, and rigorous research that I have been conducting since 2013 shows that Big Tech companies now have unprecedented power to sway elections.
This explains why my friend and colleague Stacey Lennox writes that Republicans should not go out and support Bernie Sanders in open primary states that allow people to vote in whichever primary election they wish:
In the event Sanders wins the nomination, it is likely the tech companies would work to his benefit. Google leadership’s leaked group therapy session guarantees they won’t work to the benefit of President Trump. In that case I am not sure you want to be the person who pulled the lever for a communist thinking that insanity would be easier to beat. Dr. Epstein’s research shows the game could be rigged in ways we are only beginning to understand. Just let it ride.
In the end, it may not matter. As I wrote in my book, Behind the Curtain, the worst of the worst actors on the Left — Media Matters, billionaire megadonors, and massive nonprofit foundations — bragged in 2016 about their access to the raw data for search engine companies and social media sites, and began laying out a plan to manipulate the data to make Trump look as unlikeable as possible. Indeed, they openly stated their goal to box Donald Trump in and ensure that he would never be “normalized” in American culture.
Epstein elaborated in his recent article about the methods they’ve developed at Google since then:
Forget the Russians. As I said when I testified before Congress last summer, if our own tech companies all favor the same presidential candidate this year—and that seems likely—I calculate that they can easily shift 15 million votes to that candidate without people knowing and without leaving a paper trail.
By the way, the more you know about someone, the easier it is to manipulate him or her. Google and Facebook have millions of pieces of information about every American voter, and they will be targeting their manipulations at the individual level for every single voter in every swing state. No one in the world except Google and Facebook can do that.
In President Eisenhower’s famous 1961 farewell address, he warned not only about the rise of a military-industrial complex; he also warned about the rise of a “technological elite” who could someday control our country without us knowing.
Donald Trump won the electoral college by an estimated 70,000 votes in swing states in 2016, despite losing the popular vote count. Shifting those votes seems like a minor feat in today’s digitally connected and phone-addicted world. With four years to develop new algorithms and data manipulations, and a seemingly infinite dataset to guide them, Big Tech executives could implement their view of politics in America with voters never even noticing.
Jeff Reynolds is the author of the book, “Behind the Curtain: Inside the Network of Progressive Billionaires and Their Campaign to Undermine Democracy,” available now at www.WhoOwnsTheDems.com. Jeff hosts a podcast at anchor.fm/BehindTheCurtain. You can follow him on Twitter @ChargerJeff.
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