Search Engine Manipulation Effect and the 2016 Presidential Election
Over a billion people worldwide use Google’s search engine to scour the internet in search of pages containing any number of search results. Few of these people, however, realize how much power Google has in shaping our societal opinions and behaviors.
Research by psychologist and professor Robert Epstein, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), explains how Google could in fact rig the 2016 U.S. presidential election. In the Politico article linked below, Epstein focuses on the concept of the Search Engine Manipulation Effect (SEME), which he calls “one of the largest behavioral effects ever discovered,” and capable of swaying undecided voters at a rate of 20% or more. Essentially, SEME relates the ranking of search results generated by the search algorithm to searchers’ perception of the subject of the search. In Epstein’s experiments, the likelihood of people supporting a given candidate was boosted by 37-63% if that candidate was favored by the search algorithm that the people were using to research the candidates.
As Epstein claims, the ubiquity of Google search usage in society gives Google an unprecedented amount of power in the upcoming election. The article details multiple scenarios in which Google could effectively rig the election through alterations to its search algorithm that grants one candidate’s search results a preference in ranking over the other candidate’s results.
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/08/how-google-could-rig-the-2016-election-121548