The Power of Search Engines in Elections
While just about everyone is fully aware of how useful the internet can be for finding new information, many individuals are unaware of the immense power that the search engine companies have in influencing social outcomes. Companies like Google, Microsoft, and Apple, among others, can exert this influence on a variety of important social issues, but this post will focus on elections. As the undoubtedly most popular and most used search engine, Google’s potential ability to influence election outcomes has been widely discussed over the past few weeks.
A recent study out of the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology concluded that the “Search Engine Manipulation Effect” can greatly manipulate election results. Page rank, a score given to each search result describing its likely usefulness to the searcher based on the results of programmed algorithms, is at the core of the Search Engine Manipulation Effect. As applied to elections, this theory argues that voters’ preferences for candidates is to some degree a function of the page rank of results related to each candidate. The study mentioned above examined elections in California and India, finding that undecided voters’ preferences could move by twenty percent or more if the algorithm for determining page rank was biased. Such control was characterized as a “threat to democracy” in the study.
Although these research results and the accompanying Search Engine Manipulation Effect make it clear that Google could manipulate election outcomes, this provides no indication of whether Google is already manipulating outcomes or planning on it in the future. Google released a statement that their algorithm simply aims to provide the most relevant information and that the company would not change course as this would effect people’s trust in Google. Robert Epstein, one of the researchers who conducted the study, dismissed this statement as meaningless because, in the case of elections, what is relevant can introduce an element of subjectivity. This subjectivity is built into the search algorithm, which is updated over six hundred times a year at Google.
I think the biggest take away from all of the attention that Google is getting with respect to the upcoming presidential election is that individuals need to become more aware of the great amounts of power held by companies who provide information. Western Union had a monopoly on the communications industry in the United States in 1876 and rigged the election in favor of Rutherford B. Hayes. Governments and news organizations have used propaganda to support their own agendas over the course of history. Organizations who control the dissemination of information have the power to withhold or manipulate information and to affect the way that society perceives information. It is unlikely that Google will make an obvious push to manipulate the 2016 presidential election, but people will be better off if they understand how and why Google could manipulate the results and can apply this understanding to other holders of information.
http://www.newsweek.com/why-search-engines-are-capable-deciding-elections-360201
http://money.cnn.com/2015/08/20/technology/google-2016-election/
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/08/how-google-could-rig-the-2016-election-121548
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/09/21/could-google-rig-the-2016-election-don-t-believe-the-hype.html