Saying “Search Engine Manipulation Effect” is a mouthful. When you find out what it really indicates, it will be a brainful. I’m going to do something different in this and the next blog and take a deep dive into the “what if.”
My reason to engage with you in speculative thought started with an article I read in the July 2021 issue of Whistleblower magazine. The title intrigued me: “Google can turn an election without ‘vote fraud.’
Although there were Republicans who claimed vote fraud was committed by Democrats in the 2020 presidential election, the article was written about remarks on studies made by a Democrat, Robert Epstein. This Harvard-trained researcher has been a behavioral psychologist for nearly forty years. He is a psychology professor at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology and has authored many books and articles. He has the credentials to back the claims he put forth.
Dr. Epstein has studied three national elections regarding bias-based information coming from Google. In the last, he felt he could verify that the manipulations by Google through the search engine moved at least six million votes from Donald Trump to Joe Biden. That is what he calls the Search Engine Manipulation Effect. SEME for short.
How is this possible? He has confidence in his results because of his numerous other experiments. His first scientific paper was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) in 2015. He says in his June 16, 2019, report to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, titled, “Why Google Poses a Serious Threat to Democracy, and How to End That Threat:”
Since 2012, some of my research and writings have focused on Google LLC, specifically on the company’s power to suppress content – the censorship problem, if you will – as well as on the massive surveillance the company conducts, and also on the company’s unprecedented ability to manipulate the thoughts and behavior of more than 2.5 billion people worldwide.
Data I’ve collected since 2016 show that Google displays content to the American public that is biased in favor on [sic] one political party (Epstein & Williams, 2019) – a party I happen to like, but that’s irrelevant. No private company should have either the right or the power to manipulate large populations without their knowledge.
Don’t be alarmed. This post isn’t going to be an argument for or against voter fraud. It’s about Google and your kids. In chapter 6 of my book Who’s Got Dibs on Your Kids?, I warn you about the dangers of social media. Now think how many times your child has been assigned schoolwork that entails research online. According to Dr. Epstein, when a subject is entered in the search box, responses come back with a bias that leads the searcher to the conclusion Google wants them to have. It demonstrated that even if the searcher recognizes the built-in bias, the mind is changed in the direction Google desires. He claims:
SEME is one of the most powerful forms of influence ever discovered in the behavioral sciences, and it is especially dangerous because it is invisible to people – “subliminal,” in effect. It leaves people thinking they have made up their own minds, which is very much an illusion. (Emphasis mine.) It also leaves no paper trail for authorities to trace. Worse still, the very few people who can detect bias in search results shift even farther in the direction of the bias, so merely being able to see the bias doesn’t protect you from it. . . . The problem with Google is not that it censors conservatives; the problem is that it has the power to determine what content billions of people worldwide will or not see.
Now do you understand why your children have such different beliefs and values than you? You often hear someone mention that they sent their son or daughter away to college, and they didn’t seem like the same person when they came home. Although Google is the “influencer-in-chief,” lesson plans can be written with the same intent. Invisible, subliminal programing.
For more on this, I urge you to watch the podcast between Dr. Eptstein and Glen Beck, “Google’s Hidden Dictatorship.” Let’s call it your homework assignment because I’m going to delve further into this mind manipulation in my post next week. That’s really where the “what-if” and speculative thought come into play. As you watch the podcast and perhaps read the testimony before Congress, keep in mind how this subliminal control of thinking and believing works on your child’s mind.
Wow! That is very scary.