• The big tech companies, left to their own devices , have already had a net negative effect on societies worldwide.
• At the moment, the three big threats these companies pose
  • aggressive surveillance,
  • arbitrary suppression of content,
    • the censorship problem, and
  • the subtle manipulation of
    • thoughts,
    • behaviors,
    • votes,
    • purchases,
    • attitudes and
    • beliefs
  • are unchecked worldwide

• senior research psychologist at American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology

• Epstein's organization is building two technologies that assist in combating these problems:
  • passively monitor what big tech companies are showing people online,
  • smart algorithms that will ultimately be able to identify online manipulations in realtime:
    • biased search results,
    • biased search suggestions,
    • biased newsfeeds,
    • platform-generated targeted messages,
    • platform-engineered virality,
    • shadow-banning,
    • email suppression, etc.
• Tech evolves too quickly to be managed by laws and regulations,
  • but monitoring systems are tech, and they can and will be used to curtail the destructive and dangerous powers of companies like Google and Facebook on an ongoing basis.

• seminar paper on monitoring systems, ‘Taming Big Tech -: https://is.gd/K4caTW.

• In our early experiments, reported by The Washington Post in March 2013,
  • http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/could-google-tilt-a-close-election/2013/03/29/c8d7f4e6-9587-11e2-b6f0-a5150a247b6a_story.html?ref=hackernoon.com
• we discovered that Google’s search engine had the power to shift the percentage of undecided voters supporting a political candidate by a substantial margin without anyone knowing.
• 2015 PNAS research on SEME
  • http://www.pnas.org/content/112/33/E4512.full.pdf?with-ds=yes&ref=hackernoon.com
  • stats begin
  • search results favoring one candidate
  • could easily shift the opinions and voting preferences of real voters in real elections by up to 80 percent in some demographic groups
  • with virtually no one knowing they had been manipulated.
  • stats end
  • Worse still, the few people who had noticed that we were showing them biased search results
  • generally shifted even farther in the direction of the bias,
  • so being able to spot favoritism in search results is no protection against it.
  • stats begin
  • Google’s search engine 
    • with or without any deliberate planning by Google employees 
  • was currently determining the outcomes of upwards of 25 percent of the world’s national elections.
  • This is because Google’s search engine lacks an equal-time rule,
    • so it virtually always favors one candidate over another, and that in turn shifts the preferences of undecided voters.
  • Because many elections are very close, shifting the preferences of undecided voters can easily tip the outcome.
  • stats end

author: Robert Epstein

quote

• types of search engine bias
  • the Search Suggestion Effect (SSE),
  • the Answer Bot Effect (ABE),
  • the Targeted Messaging Effect (TME), and
  • the Opinion Matching Effect (OME), among others. -
• Effects like these might now be impacting the
  • opinions,
  • beliefs,
  • attitudes,
  • decisions,
  • purchases and
  • voting preferences
• of more than two billion people every day.