The Political Power of Google’s Algorithm
As the 2016 presidential primaries has begun to take greater shape over the next few months, candidates from both political parties will increasingly attempt to shore up their defenses against one another. However, they are unlikely to account for the one unseen threat that could affect any one of them greatly: Google. This August, Robert Epstein, a senior research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology, released a paper on his study of Search Engine Manipulation Effect (SEME) and how Google’s dominance as the world’s de facto search engine could give them unregulated political power in elections across the globe.
In multiple experiments, he and his colleagues were able to greatly alter the favorability rankings of different politicians among undecided voters by giving them access to different lists of information. He and his team gave subjects access to the same set of 30 different search results, all of which came from real articles from past elections. However, they found that voter opinions were highly variable depending on the order of the search results they were given. The findings of the study showed that Epstein and his team were “able to boost the proportion of people who favored any candidate by between 37 and 63 percent after just one search session.”
The results have subsequently undergone great scrutiny from certain media outlets, and to be fair, it seems unlikely that Google’s leadership would consciously decide to manipulate a presidential election. That being said, Google does have a history of manipulating search results, their algorithm has been vulnerable to third party manipulation in the past and there is a precedent of media conglomerates manipulating US presidential elections.
For example, earlier this year, the European Union filed a lawsuit against Google, alleging that the company’s search algorithm gives priority to Google’s in-house shopping service over other retailers. In another case in which Google wasn’t even at fault, JC Penny was accused of manipulating their search algorithm by creating thousands of different pages that linked to their website in 2010. In effect, JC Penny artificially boosted the authority scores of their own page in order to drive more traffic through their websites during the holiday season. And finally, as Epstein brings up in his research, there is the 1876 election in which Western Union used its monopoly over communications to help Rutherford B. Hayes win a close election.
While that kind of anecdotal evidence may not necessarily be a damning case against the tech giant, it does indicate that Google does present a real threat to democratic elections. Search engines have become so essential to modern-day life that the seemingly banal authority scores and hub scores that Google uses in deciding what’s the best to answer our queries could very well have an impact on who our next president will be.
Sources:
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/08/how-google-could-rig-the-2016-election-121548
http://money.cnn.com/2015/04/15/technology/google-europe-anti-trust-lawsuit/
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/business/13search.html?_r=0