2 Matching Annotations
- Aug 2023
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hackernoon.com hackernoon.com
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- for: titling elections, voting - social media, voting - search engine bias, SEME, search engine manipulation effect, Robert Epstein
- summary
- research that shows how search engines can actually bias towards a political candidate in an election and tilt the election in favor of a particular party.
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In our early experiments, reported by The Washington Post in March 2013, 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.
- for: search engine manipulation effect, SEME, voting, voting - bias, voting - manipulation, voting - search engine bias, democracy - search engine bias, quote, quote - Robert Epstein, quote - search engine bias, stats, stats - tilting elections
- paraphrase
- quote
- In our early experiments, reported by The Washington Post in March 2013,
- 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
Tags
- stats
- quote - search engine bias
- quote
- voting
- voting - search engine bias
- search engine manipulation effect
- search engine bias
- elections - bias
- stats - tilting elections
- elections - interference
- quote - Robert Epstein
- PNAS SEME study
- SEME
- democracy - social media
- Washington Post story - search engine bias
- voting - social media
- democracy - search engine bias
- Robert Epstein
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