The New Mind Control
John Mauldin
In today’s Outside the Box, Robert Epstein, a senior research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology in California and the former editor-in-chief of Psychology Today, warns us of a insidious and pervasive new form of mind control: search results.
That’s right, search results. And not just any search results: Google search results. Since 2013 Epstein and colleagues have conducted a number of experiments in the US and India to determine whether search results can impact people’s political opinions.
Epstein points out that about 50 percent of our clicks go to the top two items on the first page of results, and more than 90 percent of our clicks go to the 10 items listed. And of course Google, which dominates the search business, decides which of the billions of web pages to include in our search results, and it decides how to rank them.
But surely, Epstein thought, a top search result would have only a small impact on a person’s political choices. Not so! To Epstein’s surprise, in his initial experiment he found that the proportion of people favouring the (bogus, skewed) search engine’s top-ranked candidate increased by more than 48 percent! Also, 75 percent of the subjects in the study were completely unaware that they were viewing biased search rankings.
He conducted several more experiments, including one that involved more than 2,000 people from all 50 US states. In that experiment, the shift in voting preferences induced by the researchers was 37 percent, and as high as 80 percent in some demographic groups.
Epstein was still skeptical. He asked,
Could voting preferences be shifted with real voters in the middle of a real campaign? … In real elections, people are bombarded with multiple sources of information, and they also know a lot about the candidates. It seemed unlikely that a single experience on a search engine would have much impact on their voting preferences.
So off his team went to India. They arrived just before voting began in the largest democratic election in the world, to select the nation’s prime minister. They recruited 2,150 people from 27 of India’s 35 states and territories to participate in their experiment. (To take part, they had to be registered voters who had not yet voted and who were still undecided about how they would vote.)
Again, Epstein predicted that their manipulation of search results would produce only a very small effect, if any – but that’s not what happened. On average, the researchers were able to shift the proportion of people favoring any given candidate by more than 20 percent overall and by more than 60 percent in some demographic groups. In addition, 99.5 percent of participants showed no awareness that they were viewing biased search rankings.
So this was all quite surprising. Says Epstein:
We published a detailed report about our first five experiments … in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) in August 2015. We had indeed found something important, especially given Google’s dominance over search. Google has a near-monopoly on internet searches in the US, with 83 per cent of Americans specifying Google as the search engine they use most often, according to the Pew Research Center. So if Google favours one candidate in an election, its impact on undecided voters could easily decide the election’s outcome.
But that’s a big “could.” I was skeptical, too. Would Google ever act so nefariously? Aren’t those Silicon Valley guys all live-and-let-die free-market Libertarians? And then I thought again. The presidency of the United States is a big deal. The president may not be all-powerful, but he (or maybe, in the near future, she) is about as close as it comes on this planet. And national elections – whether in this country or any other – have never exactly been squeaky clean. They have always been about big money, and in recent decades they have been about big media. Now, says Epstein, they are also about big data.
So let’s say Google decided that it was in the best interests of all concerned to do whatever it could to help us select our next president. How might it go about it? Says Epstein,
(I)f Google set about to fix an election, it could first dip into its massive database of personal information to identify just those voters who are undecided. Then it could, day after day, send customised rankings favouring one candidate to just those people. One advantage of this approach is that it would make Google’s manipulation extremely difficult for investigators to detect.
But it gets scarier – and a lot more real – when we remember that in the 2012 presidential election, Google and its top execs contributed more than $800,000 to Barack Obama and just $37,000 to Mitt Romney. Meanwhile, have you heard of The Groundwork? That would be the outfit that Quartz describes as “The stealthy, Eric Schmidt-backed startup that’s working to put Hillary Clinton in the White House” – Eric Schmidt being the executive chairman of Google’s parent company, Alphabet.
(Amusing sidebar: Google “the groundwork” and then click on the No. 1 result. That’s right, you get this:
Just one page. No links. Sinister? You betcha.)
There’s more – a lot more – to Epstein’s cautionary tale, so I’ll get out of the way and let him tell it.
But first, let me mention that although the Strategic Investment Conference (May 24-27 in Dallas) is sold out, we’re trying hard to find a way to accommodate a few more people without compromising the experience for those who have already registered. We have created a waiting list, and you can click on this link and pay a small fee (which is refundable) to get on it.
Seriously, we expanded the room this year and thought we were fine – then we sold out in less than a month. I have friends calling me up and begging to get in. Believe me when I say we are trying, but there is a space issue. So even if we are BFF’s, get on that list! THEN call. The only way to be fair and to save my sanity is to do this on a first-come, first-served basis. The line is growing, so even though the conference is t hree months away, sign up NOW!
Seriously, we expanded the room this year and thought we were fine – then we sold out in less than a month. I have friends calling me up and begging to get in. Believe me when I say we are trying, but there is a space issue. So even if we are BFF’s, get on that list! THEN call. The only way to be fair and to save my sanity is to do this on a first-come, first-served basis. The line is growing, so even though the conference is t hree months away, sign up NOW!
Your searching for answers analyst,
John Mauldin, Editor
Outside the Box
The New Mind Control
By Robert Epstein
The internet has spawned subtle forms of influence
that can flip elections and manipulate everything we say, think and do.
Over the past century, more than a few great
writers have expressed concern about humanity’s future. In The Iron Heel (1908), the
American writer Jack London pictured a world in which a handful of wealthy
corporate titans – the ‘oligarchs’ – kept the masses at bay with a brutal
combination of rewards and punishments. Much of humanity lived in virtual
slavery, while the fortunate ones were bought off with decent wages that
allowed them to live comfortably – but without any real control over their
lives.
In We
(1924), the brilliant Russian writer Yevgeny Zamyatin, anticipating
the excesses of the emerging Soviet Union, envisioned a world in which people
were kept in check through pervasive monitoring. The walls of their homes were
made of clear glass, so everything they did could be observed. They were
allowed to lower their shades an hour a day to have sex, but both the
rendezvous time and the lover had to be registered first with the state.
In Brave
New World (1932), the British author Aldous Huxley pictured a
near-perfect society in which unhappiness and aggression had been engineered
out of humanity through a combination of genetic engineering and psychological
conditioning. And in the much darker novel 1984
(1949), Huxley’s compatriot George Orwell described a society in which thought
itself was controlled; in Orwell’s world, children were taught to use a
simplified form of English called Newspeak in order to assure that they could
never express ideas that were dangerous to society.
These are all fictional tales, to be sure, and in
each the leaders who held the power used conspicuous forms of control that at
least a few people actively resisted and occasionally overcame. But in the
non-fiction bestseller The Hidden
Persuaders (1957) – recently released in a 50th-anniversary edition
– the American journalist Vance Packard described a ‘strange and rather exotic’
type of influence that was rapidly emerging in the United States and that was,
in a way, more threatening than the fictional types of control pictured in the
novels. According to Packard, US corporate executives and politicians were
beginning to use subtle and, in many cases, completely
undetectable methods to change people’s thinking, emotions and
behaviour based on insights from psychiatry and the social sciences.
Most of us have heard of at least one of these
methods: subliminal stimulation, or
what Packard called ‘subthreshold effects’ – the presentation of short messages
that tell us what to do but that are flashed so briefly we aren’t aware we have
seen them. In 1958, propelled by public concern about a theatre in New Jersey
that had supposedly hidden messages in a movie to increase ice cream sales, the
National Association of Broadcasters – the association that set standards for
US television – amended its code to prohibit the use of subliminal messages in
broadcasting. In 1974, the Federal Communications Commission opined that the
use of such messages was ‘contrary to the public interest’. Legislation to
prohibit subliminal messaging was also introduced in the US Congress but never
enacted. Both the UK and Australia have strict laws prohibiting it.
Subliminal stimulation is probably still in wide
use in the US – it’s hard to detect, after all, and no one is keeping track of
it – but it’s probably not worth worrying about. Research suggests that it has
only a small impact, and that it mainly influences people who are already
motivated to follow its dictates; subliminal directives to drink affect people
only if they’re already thirsty.
Packard had uncovered a much bigger problem,
however – namely that powerful corporations were constantly looking for, and in
many cases already applying, a wide variety of techniques for controlling
people without their knowledge. He described a kind of cabal in which marketers
worked closely with social scientists to determine, among other things, how to
get people to buy things they didn’t need and how to condition young children
to be good consumers – inclinations that were explicitly nurtured and trained
in Huxley’s Brave New World.
Guided by social science, marketers were quickly learning how to play upon
people’s insecurities, frailties, unconscious fears, aggressive feelings and
sexual desires to alter their thinking, emotions and behaviour without any
awareness that they were being manipulated.
By the early 1950s, Packard said, politicians had
got the message and were beginning to merchandise themselves using the same
subtle forces being used to sell soap. Packard prefaced his chapter on politics
with an unsettling quote from the British economist Kenneth Boulding: ‘A world
of unseen dictatorship is conceivable, still using the forms of democratic
government.’ Could this really happen, and, if so, how would it work?
The forces that Packard described have become more
pervasive over the decades. The soothing music we all hear overhead in
supermarkets causes us to walk more slowly and buy more food, whether we need
it or not. Most of the vacuous thoughts and intense feelings our teenagers
experience from morning till night are carefully orchestrated by highly skilled
marketing professionals working in our fashion and entertainment industries.
Politicians work with a wide range of consultants who test every aspect of what
the politicians do in order to sway voters: clothing, intonations, facial
expressions, makeup, hairstyles and speeches are all optimised, just like the
packaging of a breakfast cereal.
Fortunately, all of these sources of influence
operate competitively. Some of the persuaders want us to buy or believe one
thing, others to buy or believe something else. It is the competitive nature of
our society that keeps us, on balance, relatively free.
But what would happen if new sources of control
began to emerge that had little or no competition? And what if new means of
control were developed that were far more powerful – and far more invisible – than any that have
existed in the past? And what if new types of control allowed a handful of
people to exert enormous influence not just over the citizens of the US but
over most of the people on Earth?
It might surprise you to hear this, but these
things have already happened.
To understand how the new forms of mind control
work, we need to start by looking at the search engine – one in particular: the
biggest and best of them all, namely Google. The Google search engine is so
good and so popular that the company’s name is now a commonly used verb in
languages around the world.
To ‘Google’ something is to look it up on the
Google search engine, and that, in fact, is how most computer users worldwide
get most of their information about just about everything these days. They Google it. Google has become
the main gateway to virtually all knowledge, mainly because the search engine
is so good at giving us exactly the information we are looking for, almost
instantly and almost always in the first position of the list it shows us after
we launch our search – the list of ‘search results’.
That ordered list is so good, in fact, that about
50 per cent of our clicks go to the top two items, and more than 90 per cent of
our clicks go to the 10 items listed on the first page of results; few people
look at other results pages, even though they often number in the thousands,
which means they probably contain lots of good information. Google decides
which of the billions of web pages it is going to include in our search
results, and it also decides how to rank them. How it decides these things is a
deep, dark secret – one of the best-kept secrets in the world, like the formula
for Coca-Cola.
Because people are far more likely to read and
click on higher-ranked items, companies now spend billions of dollars every
year trying to trick Google’s search algorithm – the computer program that does
the selecting and ranking – into boosting them another notch or two. Moving up
a notch can mean the difference between success and failure for a business, and
moving into the top slots can be the key to fat profits.
Late in 2012, I began to wonder whether highly
ranked search results could be impacting more than consumer choices. Perhaps, I
speculated, a top search result could have a small impact on people’s opinions
about things. Early in 2013, with my associate Ronald E Robertson of the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology
in Vista, California, I put this idea to a test by conducting an experiment in
which 102 people from the San Diego area were randomly assigned to one of three
groups. In one group, people saw search results that favoured one political
candidate – that is, results that linked to web pages that made this candidate
look better than his or her opponent. In a second group, people saw search
rankings that favoured the opposing candidate, and in the third group – the
control group – people saw a mix of rankings that favoured neither candidate.
The same search results and w eb pages were used in each group; the only thing
that differed for the three groups was the ordering of the search results.
To make our experiment realistic, we used real
search results that linked to real web pages. We also used a real election –
the 2010 election for the prime minister of Australia. We used a foreign
election to make sure that our participants were ‘undecided’. Their lack of
familiarity with the candidates assured this. Through advertisements, we also
recruited an ethnically diverse group of registered voters over a wide age
range in order to match key demographic characteristics of the US voting
population.
All participants were first given brief
descriptions of the candidates and then asked to rate them in various ways, as
well as to indicate which candidate they would vote for; as you might expect,
participants initially favoured neither candidate on any of the five measures
we used, and the vote was evenly split in all three groups. Then the
participants were given up to 15 minutes in which to conduct an online search
using ‘Kadoodle’, our mock search engine, which gave them access to five pages
of search results that linked to web pages. People could move freely between
search results and web pages, just as we do when using Google. When
participants completed their search, we asked them to rate the candidates
again, and we also asked them again who they would vote for.
We predicted that the opinions and voting
preferences of 2 or 3 per cent of the people in the two bias groups – the
groups in which people were seeing rankings favouring one candidate – would
shift toward that candidate. What we actually found was astonishing. The
proportion of people favouring the search engine’s top-ranked candidate
increased by 48.4 per cent,
and all five of our measures shifted toward that candidate. What’s more, 75 per
cent of the people in the bias groups seemed to have been completely unaware
that they were viewing biased search rankings. In the control group, opinions
did not shift significantly.
This seemed to be a major discovery. The shift we
had produced, which we called the Search Engine Manipulation Effect (or SEME,
pronounced ‘seem’), appeared to be one of the largest behavioural effects ever
discovered. We did not immediately uncork the Champagne bottle, however. For
one thing, we had tested only a small number of people, and they were all from
the San Diego area.
Over the next year or so, we replicated our
findings three more times, and the third time was with a sample of more than
2,000 people from all 50 US states. In that experiment, the shift in voting
preferences was 37.1 per cent and even higher in some demographic groups – as
high as 80 per cent, in fact.
We also learned in this series of experiments that
by reducing the bias just slightly on the first page of search results –
specifically, by including one search item that favoured the other candidate in the third or
fourth position of the results – we could mask
our manipulation so that few or even no
people were aware that they were seeing biased rankings. We could still produce
dramatic shifts in voting preferences, but we could do so invisibly.
Still no Champagne, though. Our results were
strong and consistent, but our experiments all involved a foreign election –
that 2010 election in Australia. Could voting preferences be shifted with real
voters in the middle of a real campaign? We were skeptical. In real elections,
people are bombarded with multiple sources of information, and they also know a
lot about the candidates. It seemed unlikely that a single experience on a
search engine would have much impact on their voting preferences.
To find out, in early 2014, we went to India just
before voting began in the largest democratic election in the world – the Lok
Sabha election for prime minister. The three main candidates were Rahul Gandhi,
Arvind Kejriwal, and Narendra Modi. Making use of online subject pools and both
online and print advertisements, we recruited 2,150 people from 27 of India’s
35 states and territories to participate in our experiment. To take part, they
had to be registered voters who had not yet voted and who were still undecided
about how they would vote.
Participants were randomly assigned to three
search-engine groups, favouring, respectively, Gandhi, Kejriwal or Modi. As one
might expect, familiarity levels with the candidates was high – between 7.7 and
8.5 on a scale of 10. We predicted that our manipulation would produce a very
small effect, if any, but that’s not what we found. On average, we were able to
shift the proportion of people favouring any given candidate by more than 20
per cent overall and more than 60 per cent in some demographic groups. Even
more disturbing, 99.5 per cent of our participants showed no awareness that
they were viewing biased search rankings – in other words, that they were being
manipulated.
SEME’s near-invisibility is curious indeed. It
means that when people – including you and me – are looking at biased search
rankings, they look just fine.
So if right now you Google ‘US presidential candidates’, the search results you
see will probably look fairly random, even
if they happen to favour one candidate. Even I have trouble
detecting bias in search rankings that I know
to be biased (because they were prepared by my staff). Yet our randomised,
controlled experiments tell us over and over again that when higher-ranked
items connect with web pages that favour one candidate, this has a dramatic
impact on the opinions of undecided voters, in large part for the simple reason
that people tend to click only on higher-ranked items. This is truly scary:
like subliminal stimuli, SEME is a force you can’t see; but unlike subliminal
stimuli, it has an enormous impact – like Casper the ghost pushing y ou down a
flight of stairs.
We published a detailed report about our first five experiments on SEME in the
prestigious Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) in August 2015. We had indeed
found something important, especially given Google’s dominance over search.
Google has a near-monopoly on internet searches in the US, with 83 per cent of
Americans specifying Google as the search engine they use most often, according
to the Pew Research Center. So if Google favours one candidate in
an election, its impact on undecided voters could easily decide the election’s
outcome.
Keep in mind that we had had only one shot at our
participants. What would be the impact of favouring one candidate in searches
people are conducting over a period of weeks or months before an election? It
would almost certainly be much larger than what we were seeing in our
experiments.
Other types of influence during an election
campaign are balanced by competing sources of influence – a wide variety of
newspapers, radio shows and television networks, for example – but Google, for
all intents and purposes, has no competition, and people trust its search
results implicitly, assuming that the company’s mysterious search algorithm is
entirely objective and unbiased. This high level of trust, combined with the
lack of competition, puts Google in a unique position to impact elections. Even
more disturbing, the search-ranking business is entirely unregulated, so Google
could favour any candidate it likes without violating any laws. Some courts have even ruled that Google’s right to
rank-order search results as it pleases is protected as a form of free speech.
Does the company ever favour particular
candidates? In the 2012 US presidential election, Google and its top executives
donated more than $800,000 to President Barack Obama and just $37,000 to his
opponent, Mitt Romney. And in 2015, a team of researchers from the University
of Maryland and elsewhere showed that Google’s search results routinely favoured
Democratic candidates. Are Google’s search rankings really biased? An internal report issued by the US Federal Trade Commission
in 2012 concluded that Google’s search rankings routinely put Google’s
financial interests ahead of those of their competitors, and anti-trust actions
currently under way against Google in both the European Union and India are based on similar findings.
In most countries, 90 per cent of online search is
conducted on Google, which gives the company even more power to flip elections
than it has in the US and, with internet penetration increasing rapidly
worldwide, this power is growing. In our PNAS
article, Robertson and I calculated that Google now has the power to flip
upwards of 25 per cent of the
national elections in the world with no one knowing this is
occurring. In fact, we estimate that, with or without deliberate planning on
the part of company executives, Google’s search rankings have been impacting
elections for years, with growing impact each year. And because search rankings
are ephemeral, they leave no paper trail, which gives the company complete
deniability.
Power on this scale and with this level of
invisibility is unprecedented in human history. But it turns out that our
discovery about SEME was just the tip of a very large iceberg.
Recent reports suggest that the Democratic presidential candidate
Hillary Clinton is making heavy use of social media to try to generate support
– Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat and Facebook, for starters. At this
writing, she has 5.4 million followers on Twitter, and her staff is tweeting
several times an hour during waking hours. The Republican frontrunner, Donald
Trump, has 5.9 million Twitter followers and is tweeting just as frequently.
Is social media as big a threat to democracy as
search rankings appear to be?
Not necessarily. When new technologies are used
competitively, they present no threat. Even through the platforms are new, they
are generally being used the same way as billboards and television commercials
have been used for decades: you put a billboard on one side of the street; I
put one on the other. I might have the money to erect more billboards than you,
but the process is still competitive.
What happens, though, if such technologies are
misused by the companies that own them? A study by Robert M Bond, now a political science professor
at Ohio State University, and others published in Nature in 2012 described an ethically questionable
experiment in which, on election day in 2010, Facebook sent ‘go out and vote’
reminders to more than 60 million of its users. The reminders caused about
340,000 people to vote who otherwise would not have. Writing in the New Republic in 2014, Jonathan Zittrain,
professor of international law at Harvard University, pointed out that, given
the massive amount of information it has collected about its users, Facebook
could easily send such messages only to people who supp ort one particular
party or candidate, and that doing so could easily flip a close election – with no one knowing that this has occurred.
And because advertisements, like search rankings, are ephemeral, manipulating
an election in this way would leave no paper trail.
Are there laws prohibiting Facebook from sending
out ads selectively to certain users? Absolutely not; in fact, targeted
advertising is how Facebook makes its money. Is Facebook currently manipulating
elections in this way? No one knows, but in my view it would be foolish and
possibly even improper for Facebook not
to do so. Some candidates are better for a company than others, and Facebook’s
executives have a fiduciary responsibility to the company’s stockholders to
promote the company’s interests.
The Bond study was largely ignored, but another Facebook experiment, published in 2014 in PNAS, prompted protests around
the world. In this study, for a period of a week, 689,000 Facebook users were
sent news feeds that contained either an excess of positive terms, an excess of
negative terms, or neither. Those in the first group subsequently used slightly
more positive terms in their communications, while those in the second group
used slightly more negative terms in their communications. This was said to
show that people’s ‘emotional states’ could be deliberately manipulated on a
massive scale by a social media company, an idea that many people found
disturbing. People were also upset that a large-scale experiment on emotion had
been conducted without the explicit consent of any of the participants.
Facebook’s consumer profiles are undoubtedly
massive, but they pale in comparison with those maintained by Google, which is
collecting information about people 24/7, using more than 60 different observation platforms – the search
engine, of course, but also Google Wallet, Google Maps, Google Adwords, Google
Analytics, Chrome, Google Docs, Android, YouTube, and on and on. Gmail users
are generally oblivious to the fact that Google stores and analyses every email
they write, even the drafts they never send – as well as all the incoming email they receive
from both Gmail and non-Gmail users.
According to Google’s privacy policy – to which one assents whenever one uses a
Google product, even when one has not been informed that he or she is using a
Google product – Google can share the information it collects about you with
almost anyone, including government agencies. But never with you. Google’s privacy is
sacrosanct; yours is nonexistent.
Could Google and ‘those we work with’ (language
from the privacy policy) use the information they are amassing about you for
nefarious purposes – to manipulate or coerce, for example? Could inaccurate
information in people’s profiles (which people have no way to correct) limit
their opportunities or ruin their reputations?
Certainly, if Google set about to fix an election,
it could first dip into its massive database of personal information to
identify just those voters who are undecided. Then it could, day after day,
send customised rankings favouring one candidate to just those people. One advantage of this approach
is that it would make Google’s manipulation extremely difficult for
investigators to detect.
Extreme forms of monitoring, whether by the KGB in
the Soviet Union, the Stasi in East Germany, or Big Brother in 1984, are essential elements of
all tyrannies, and technology is making both monitoring and the consolidation
of surveillance data easier than ever. By 2020, China will have put in place
the most ambitious government monitoring system ever created – a single database
called the Social Credit System, in which multiple ratings and records
for all of its 1.3 billion citizens are recorded for easy access by officials
and bureaucrats. At a glance, they will know whether someone has plagiarised
schoolwork, was tardy in paying bills, urinated in public, or blogged
inappropriately online.
As Edward Snowden’s revelations made clear, we are
rapidly moving toward a world in which both governments and corporations –
sometimes working together – are collecting massive amounts of data about every
one of us every day, with few or no laws in place that restrict how those data
can be used.
When you combine the data collection with the desire to control or
manipulate, the possibilities are endless, but perhaps the most frightening
possibility is the one expressed in Boulding’s assertion that an ‘unseen
dictatorship’ was possible ‘using the forms of democratic government’.
Since Robertson and I submitted our initial report
on SEME to PNAS early
in 2015, we have completed a sophisticated series of experiments that have
greatly enhanced our understanding of this phenomenon, and other experiments
will be completed in the coming months. We have a much better sense now of why
SEME is so powerful and how, to some extent, it can be suppressed.
We have also learned something very disturbing –
that search engines are influencing far more than what people buy and whom they
vote for. We now have evidence suggesting that on virtually all issues where
people are initially undecided, search rankings are impacting almost every
decision that people make. They are having an impact on the opinions, beliefs,
attitudes and behaviours of internet users worldwide – entirely without
people’s knowledge that this is occurring. This is happening with or without
deliberate intervention by company officials; even so-called ‘organic’ search
processes regularly generate search results that favour one point of view, and
that in turn has the potential to tip the opinions of millions of people who
are undecided on an issue. In one of our recent experiments, biased search
results shifted people’s opinions about the value of fracking by 33.9 per cent.
Perhaps even more disturbing is that the handful
of people who do show awareness that they are viewing biased search rankings
shift even further in
the predicted direction; simply knowing that a list is biased doesn’t
necessarily protect you from SEME’s power.
Remember what the search algorithm is doing: in
response to your query, it is selecting
a handful of webpages from among the billions that are available, and it is ordering those webpages using
secret criteria. Seconds later, the decision you make or the opinion you form –
about the best toothpaste to use, whether fracking is safe, where you should go
on your next vacation, who would make the best president, or whether global
warming is real – is determined by that short list you are shown, even though
you have no idea how the list was generated.
Meanwhile, behind the scenes, a consolidation of
search engines has been quietly taking place, so that more people are using the
dominant search engine even when they think they are not. Because Google is the
best search engine, and because crawling the rapidly expanding internet has
become prohibitively expensive, more and more search engines are drawing their
information from the leader rather than generating it themselves. The most
recent deal, revealed in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing in October 2015,
was between Google and Yahoo! Inc.
Looking ahead to the November 2016 US presidential
election, I see clear signs that Google is backing Hillary Clinton. In April
2015, Clinton hired Stephanie Hannon away from Google to be her chief
technology officer and, a few months ago, Eric Schmidt, chairman of the holding
company that controls Google, set up a semi-secret company – The Groundwork – for the
specific purpose of putting Clinton in office. The formation of The Groundwork
prompted Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks, to dub Google Clinton’s ‘secret weapon’ in her quest for the US presidency.
We now estimate that Hannon’s old friends have the
power to drive between 2.6 and 10.4 million votes to Clinton on election day
with no one knowing that this is occurring and without leaving a paper trail.
They can also help her win the nomination, of course, by influencing undecided
voters during the primaries. Swing voters have always been the key to winning
elections, and there has never been a more powerful, efficient or inexpensive
way to sway them than SEME.
We are living in a world in which a handful of
high-tech companies, sometimes working hand-in-hand with governments, are not
only monitoring much of our activity, but are also invisibly controlling more
and more of what we think, feel, do and say. The technology that now surrounds
us is not just a harmless toy; it has also made possible undetectable and
untraceable manipulations of entire populations – manipulations that have no
precedent in human history and that are currently well beyond the scope of
existing regulations and laws. The new hidden persuaders are bigger, bolder and
badder than anything Vance Packard ever envisioned. If we choose to ignore
this, we do so at our peril.
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