And it’s the Russians that are affecting our elections?

How does a psychologist quantify how many votes were impacted by Google????

What methodology is he using? This seems like junk science. I mean, you deny climate science but you buy into some random psychologist?

This is why people think folks on the right are really stupid.

 

US media can affect elections.
US companies can.
US grassroots campaigns can.
US privately-funded propoganda campaigns can.

What's new here?

We are concerned about other countries and other governments influencing our elections. Not how we influence our own.

 

Whoa, hold on there, you're making too much sense.

 

Been binge watching The Americans and starting to see the Soviet point of view tbh

 

How do you expect people to react when you constantly post crap down here?

 

LOL. Trumpers......DISTRACT! Russians got Baby Hands elected.

 

Gonna be a tough election year for you.

DD

 

yep, And it's a Fox Networks show, which is now owned by Walt Disney.

...see...it's all starting to make sense

 

A psychologist believes that people were manipulated against voting for a person psychologists regard as psychotic.


Sounds about right

 

You are almost as good as trump at altering images. Keep working at it champ

 

mick try, mick fail

 

The lack of respect here comes from someone who cannot spend 15-20 minutes on reading about the controversy and coming up with their own opinion.

OP is like Lassie barking about some god knows what disaster only to have Timmy pull a fast one on the poor b****.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/19/us/politics/google-votes-election-trump.html- looks into different research, confirms some Dem bias but not the numbers Trump likes to miscount.
https://slate.com/technology/2019/08/robert-epstein-google-bias-conservative-bogus-trump.html

It doesn’t matter that Epstein’s claims are so easily dismantled. Cries over social media bias have been a right-wing refrain since an overbaked controversy over Facebook’s Trending News section demonstrated the company will bend over backward if enough conservatives get upset loudly enough. After all, Facebook, Google, Twitter, and their peers want their products to be used by everyone, and they certainly don’t want to tick off politicians of either party. What’s telling is that even when the major technology companies indulge conservative complaints, there’s still no proof that they’re systematically injecting political bias into their products. (What the platforms have actually started doing is take measures to ban figures who peddle in conspiracy theories and hate speech, and who incite harassment and violence.

...

The Epstein meme typifies this dynamic. A pop psychologist and cable-news regular, he regularly publishes op-eds in conservative outlets like the Epoch Times and the Daily Caller, as well as the occasional piece in Politico or USA Today. He once appeared on The O’Reilly Factor to explain why he thinks teens should be treated as adults (in a book on that topic, he argued in favor of corporal punishment), and on a Fox News morning show in 2008, he argued in favor of teens getting married, pointing out that “Mary was 12 or 13 when she had Jesus, was she not?” More recently he’s focused on Google, Facebook, and why he believes they can throw elections. As he explained to Tucker Carlson this March, “Google can take a 50/50 split among undecided voters and change it to a 90/10 split with no one knowing they have been manipulated.” In his testimony to the Senate, Epstein called the effect of search engine manipulation “one of the most powerful forms of influence ever discovered in the behavioral sciences.”


Epstein may prefer Clinton to Trump, but the thing he seems to really dislike is Google. An article in the New York Times from early 2012 points to a tiff the psychologist had with the company after his website was hacked. Google directed visitors not to go to his page until the malicious code was removed—and kept the warning up even after Epstein tried, apparently unsuccessfully, to clean up his security and begged Google to remove the label. Epstein threatened to sue the company for not removing the warning, explaining to the Times that he felt like he was yelling at a brick wall. Later that year, he published a series of articles in the Huffington Post about why Google should be regulated. For the next few years, he began to publish more regularly about how easily Google could throw an election, largely citing himself. Starting in 2016, he become a regular on Breitbart discussing the Google topic.

Among academics, Epstein is a lonely voice on Google’s election-throwing powers. “When Dr. Epstein says the effects are ‘huge’ and ‘more powerful’ than anything he has ever seen, I respectfully suggest that he needs to read the political science literature before making that claim,” Katherine Haenschen, a communications professor at Virginia Tech University who studies internet targeting on voter turnout, told Mother Jones this week. “Large-scale digital mobilization has basically failed to deliver sizable effects in terms of persuasion or turnout.” Never mind the fact that in Epstein’s study, it’s not clear what search terms were used by his participants, or what the “biased” search results were. In his research, Epstein graded search engines for bias, determining that mainstream news outlets like the New York Times dominated over conservative sources like Breitbart in Google’s results. Epstein doesn’t explain the context in which the searches were conducted—which is important to know, since the whole point of Google Search is that it personalizes results based on prior searches and the user’s location. Someone with a recent search history about guns in Tennessee will likely see different search results than someone with a recent search history about women’s health care in New York City. And a good study would take care to somehow sanitize or disclose each participant’s search environment before reaching any conclusions.


Despite the severe limitations of Epstein’s research, Trump latched on, exaggerating the already unbelievable findings. Even Epstein didn’t claim that Google directly “manipulated” any votes, and his high number was 10.4 million votes, not 16 million.

...

Although Trump has reportedly recently weighed signing an executive order that would have federal agencies police how social media companies moderate user content, it’s hard to believe that some sort of real crackdown is in the works—or that if one was, it could survive a court challenge. It’s more likely that conservatives keep talking about bias on social platforms for two reasons. One, the topic really fires up their extremely online supporters—like the group of conspiracy theorists, Infowars regulars, and racist meme-makers that the White House hosted recently at a “social media summit.”

The second reason is social media really does work in conservatives’ favor, and they don’t want the companies to do anything that might change that. Month after month this year, the Trump campaign has outspent all the Democratic candidates combined on Facebook ads. Even after the company tweaked its news feed algorithm to deprioritize news and politics, conservatives across the board are thriving on Facebook. Fox News is one of the biggest publishers on Facebook, far outranking CNN in terms of both followers and engagement. Not coincidentally, all of this discussion of bias obscures many of the real problems with social media—like their ability to amplify emotional and divisive content and their vulnerability to misinformation.
​

I'm probably not the only one working in tech who feels immensely creeped out by FAMG and the amount of influence they have over people's lives. The way FB allowed Cambridge Analytica take their user's info and repackage it so that the Trump campaign had a target demo to funnel ad money back into FB is the greasy reality of dark money.

But I also know enough to know the number is drawn out of his ass with no way to prove it.

It's fluffy marketing bs where a green button will get more impressions than a red button. Nice...you get a cookie, but does that really mean a human being will take time to go to a voting booth? In my dumber days, I signed up to newsletters from different candidates. With that "walled garden", I guess I could've been one slam dunk vote, but surprise...science failed and I did not vote for that candidate.

Maybe Popsy can whip up a page or two on the failings of the do-nothing millennial generation from that statistically significant nugget.

 

Of course there is a Soviet view. Imagine if the US wasn’t part of NATO and Russia was, and Russia invited Mexico and Canada into the alliance. There is a lot of warranted anxiety about America from Russia’s perspective, but it’s important when we broach the subject of Russia/US to separate Putin from Russia’s perspective from their general citizens.

Putin simply wants the US to stop being a Democracy so he can continue to sell his brand of autocracy in his country to stay in power and avoid uprising. It’s that simple. It’s less about the complexities of the Russia/US relationship and more about one mans grasp with power and wealth.

We have to be better about calling that out while still acknowledging the perspective of Russian citizens.