Google Influenced Midterms, Cost Republican Seats, Study Reveals
Search engine expert Dr. Robert Epstein reveals clear pro Democrat bias in findings
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A new research study has revealed that search giant Google had biased search results that impacted the 2018 midterm elections and possibly costing Republicans three congressional districts.
Psychologist and search engine expert Dr. Robert Epstein revealed that tens of thousands of votes were pushed towards theDemocrats in three key congressional races as a result of Google's built-in bias.
Epstein and a team at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology (AIBRT), analyzed Google searches relating to three highly competing congressional races in Southern California.
The Democrats won in all three races, as Epstein’s research suggests that Google's biased search result tipped them over the edge.
A previous study in 2016 revealed that biased Google results pushed votes to Hillary Clinton in the presidential election.
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But both Google and Democrats have disputed these findings.
Epstein states that in run-up o the 2018 midterms, he preserved “more than 47,000 election-related searches on Google, Bing, and Yahoo, along with the nearly 400,000 web pages to which the search results linked.”
A very clear pro-Democrat bias in 'election-related' Google searches was shown, according to the analysis of the data.
Anyone searching for stories relating to the three congressional races where more likely to see pro-Democrat stories, the study said.
This has a massive impact on the decisions of undecided voters, who assume their search are unbiased, according to previous studies.
At least 35,455 voters in the three districts may have been influenced to vote for a Democrat.
When each vote gained by a Democrat is potentially a vote lost by a Republican, it means over 70,910 votes may have been lost by Republicans in the three districts because of Google bias.
The Democrat margin of victory was just over 12,000 votes in one particular district
According to Breitbart: The total Democrat win margin across all three districts was 71,337, meaning that bias Google searches could account for the vast majority of Democrat votes.
Extrapolated to elections around the country, Epstein says that bias Google results could have influenced 4.6 million undecided voters to support Democrat candidates.
Moreover, Epstein’s findings are based on modest assumptions, such as the assumption that voters conduct one election-related search per week.
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According to Epstein, marketing research notes that people typically conduct 4-5 searches per day, not one per week.
In other words, the true impact of biased search results could be much higher.
Epstein’s study may also underestimate the level of liberal bias in Google search results, due to its use of a 2017 study from Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center to rank sources by their bias.
As the Los Angeles Times notes, Epstein is not a Republican and publicly supported Hillary Clinton in 2016. Nevertheless, Democrats and liberals continue to ignore or doubt his findings.
House Judiciary Committee chairman Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) has repeatedly called claims of big tech bias a “conspiracy theory,” as have other congressional Democrats. And left-wing academics interviewed by the Los Angeles Times also heaped doubt on Epstein’s work.
Dr. Robert Epstein is featured in the 2018 documentary The Creepy Line, which was produced by Breitbart News editor-at-large Peter Schweizer and explored the bias amongst the Masters of the Universe in Silicon Valley.
Recent reports reveal that company managers have told employees that the tech giant must stop “fake news” because “that’s how Trump won,” that Google-owned YouTube adjusted its algorithms to push pro-life content off its top search results, and that the company’s internal researchers describe the company’s changes in policy since 2016 as a “shift towards censorship.”
