As the internet has taken over our lives, Google has become a ubiquitous presence, controlling the vast majority of online and mobile search traffic. But what happens if Google uses their power as the 500 lb. gorilla of the internet to influence elections?
That’s exactly what Google is accused of doing, in a video released by SourceFed that appears to show Google manipulating its autocomplete function to discourage negative searches about Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.
As Heat Street’s sister publication MarketWatch reported, when SourceFed tried several searches related to Hillary Clinton, negative results were filtered out on Google in favor of positive or neutral stories, but that didn’t happen with Google’s competitor search engines, Yahoo or Bing.
As SourceFed’s Matt Lieberman explains in the video, “There’s an inherent trust that when you Google something, you are seeing the actual factual answer to your query or question, based at least in part on what other people are searching for.”
However, regarding Clinton, he states, “we know for a fact that that is not the case… Google has been actively altering search recommendations in favor of Hillary Clinton’s campaign.”
“The intention is clear: Google is burying potential searches that could have hurt Hillary Clinton in the primary elections over the past several months by manipulating recommendations on their site,” says Lieberman.
SourceFed also ran searches to find negative stories on Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. In both of these cases, there was no similar evidence of tampering and all three search engines had similar results.
“Google’s bias here is undeniable,” concludes Lieberman.
Lieberman does note that they don’t have evidence that the Clinton campaign asked for Google to do this, and they aren’t accusing anyone of any crimes, but says this is still highly unethical.
Concerns have been growing for years about how influential internet companies could affect elections. Last August, Wired published an article titled, “Google’s Search Algorithm Could Steal the Presidency,” which examined a study on how search results can influence voting behavior:
[A] study published this week says that the order of those results, the ranking of positive or negative stories on the screen, can have an enormous influence on the way you vote. And if the election is close enough, the effect could be profound enough to change the outcome.
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One group saw positive articles about one candidate first; the other saw positive articles about the other candidate. (A control group saw a random assortment.) The result: Whichever side people saw the positive results for, they were more likely to vote for—by more than 48 percent.
Facebook, the other juggernaut in the internet content game, has also faced harsh criticism this year related to accusations that it was blocking conservative news from its trending topics and other efforts to censor conservative content. The issue was so serious that Senate Commerce Committee Chairman John Thune sent a letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg demanding an explanation, and the Senate launched an inquiry.
Heat Street reached out to Senator Thune’s office to inquire whether a similar inquiry was being considered regarding Google but had not received a response as of press time.
On a related note, back during the 2010 Congressional elections, Facebook was able to get an estimated 340,000 extra people to the polls by showing a message to 61 million of its users encouraging them to vote. That message was neutral and not advocating for or against any particular candidates, but given the immense amount of data we allow Facebook to access, it would be completely feasible for Facebook to target its get-out-the-vote message just to Democrats, if it so chose.
According to Harvard Law professor Jonathan Zittrain, this kind of “digital gerrymandering” poses a threat to democracy itself. “The wrong in digital gerrymandering is perhaps not a wrong to a given individual user, but rather to everyone, even non-users. It represents an abuse of a powerful platform,” writes Zittrain, and this kind of “quietly engineered election” threatens our collective rights “to enjoy the benefits of a democratic process.”
In a close election, this kind of manipulation could most certainly affect the results. In this wildly unpredictable election cycle that features two major party candidates with historically high unfavorable ratings — and could still see one or more third party candidates having a significant effect — little nudges here and there from Google, Facebook, and other internet influencers could very well pick our next president.
Libertarians and other supporters of free markets are often loath to invite government intervention and control over private businesses like Google and Facebook, but considering the importance of what’s at stake here, the millions of Americans who use and depend on these services should demand more transparency in how they operate.
Follow Sarah Rumpf on Twitter at: @rumpfshaker.
