A research psychologist who previously released a study that demonstrates how Google has the power to sway elections is once again sounding the alarm about the tech giant. Dr. Robert Epstein, a Californian Democrat who has been researching Google’s result manipulation tactics over the past decade, shared his latest findings with the New York Post.
Epstein previously estimated that upwards of six-million votes were shifted to Joe Biden in 2020 due to Google’s manipulated algorithm. The tech giant used its virtual monopoly to elevate links that were positive for Biden while also amplifying negative stories for then-President Trump. Get Out The Vote messaging on Google’s homepage was also targeted toward Democrat voters.
As part of his most recent project, Epstein found that YouTube’s ” “Up Next” suggestions to adults for the next video to watch were skewed towards left-leaning sources 76% of the time. In order to determine leanings, he used an average ranking from three nonpartisan organizations which measure media bias to assign liberal, conservative, or centrist labels to the sources of the videos.
The results were staggering for children and teens, with initial data showing liberal videos suggested 96% of the time. “That’s how aggressive they are with our kids,” Epstein told the New York Post. “Because they think they’re gods. And no one has ever taken them to task, ever.”
Left-leaning video content accounts for just 38% of the content on YouTube, preliminary data showed, with the rest being classified as right-leaning or centrist. Despite this, search results and suggestions are overwhelmingly skewed toward the left.
Column’s up: When it comes to censorship, liberal bias and election interference, the worst Big Tech culprit of all has been getting a free pass — and now Google is coming for our children.
https://t.co/q8F3WXWBzy— Miranda Devine (@mirandadevine) May 25, 2023
Journalist Matt Taibi previously testified before Congress about the censorship and manipulation practices from big tech companies in 2020, including Google. “Effectively, news media became an arm of a state-sponsored thought-policing system,” Taibbi said at a March hearing of the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.
“We learned Twitter, Facebook, Google, and other companies developed a formal system for taking in moderation ‘requests’ from every corner of government: the FBI, DHS, HHS, DOD, the Global Engagement Center at State, even the CIA.”