Research Suggests Google Search Results Can Influence An Election

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Research shows that Google search results can influence an election? Why not? It influences damn near everything else. :eek:

Psychologist Robert Epstein has been researching this question and says he is alarmed at what he has discovered. His most recent experiment, whose findings were released Monday, found that search engines have the potential to profoundly influence voters without them noticing the impact. Epstein has coined a term for this power: Search Engine Manipulation Effect, with the acronym SEME.
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I noticed this since 2008. I couldn't find negative info on a local "favored" candidate using Google but if I was willing to read through old newspaper articles at the library, I could find that information. Until Google has the ability to erase newsprint archived at the libraries, there is still some hope.
 
amddragonpc said:
I noticed this since 2008. I couldn't find negative info on a local "favored" candidate using Google but if I was willing to read through old newspaper articles at the library, I could find that information. Until Google has the ability to erase newsprint archived at the libraries, there is still some hope.
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No there isn't, because very, very few people are hitting up the archives at the library when looking for the news.
 
This thread will be swarmed in short order with people denying it matters.


Anyways, you can't prove it. I saw a biased result and kept searching the same thing rapidly without clicking any one result, suddenly the bias was gone. So basically if you identify an example to show it, people start trying it for themselves, they back off it and the example evaporates
 
I remember seeing a similar thing on Digg when Obama first ran. Any anti-obama comment would be down voted into oblivion. Like10 times further than any comments were 6 months prior. About a year after the election, I went through old comments and noticed that the every comment defending him belonged to an abandoned account.
 
People have been talking about this since the 2012 election. Obama had a huge advantage in that election as he was savvy enough to hire some pretty sharp guys, like Dan Siroker of Google.

On the public level, they implemented a wide range of strategies to fundraise and get out the vote. They were a generation ahead of Romney in their approach. Sure, they did some pretty sketchy things like not using CVV and address verification (which allowed them to skirt election funding laws), but most of what they did was simply putting technology to good use.

On another level, there was an astroturf campaign to manipulate news reports, editorials and blog posts. Google bombing, spamdexing, etc were all used to good effect. Having a senior google guy on board made it simple to subvert search results. During that campaign, you would get hugely different search results on Bing and google; the google results were very biased to obama. There have been a number of article published about this
 
pigster said:
People have been talking about this since the 2012 election. Obama had a huge advantage in that election as he was savvy enough to hire some pretty sharp guys, like Dan Siroker of Google.

On the public level, they implemented a wide range of strategies to fundraise and get out the vote. They were a generation ahead of Romney in their approach. Sure, they did some pretty sketchy things like not using CVV and address verification (which allowed them to skirt election funding laws), but most of what they did was simply putting technology to good use.

On another level, there was an astroturf campaign to manipulate news reports, editorials and blog posts. Google bombing, spamdexing, etc were all used to good effect. Having a senior google guy on board made it simple to subvert search results. During that campaign, you would get hugely different search results on Bing and google; the google results were very biased to obama. There have been a number of article published about this
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God, i hope they aren't for Hillary. Would have to go and "do" something to the datacenter up the road from me. Just kidding, but this type of thing does worry me. Had enough of the Clintons when slick willy was in office. Don't need his psychopathic wife running the country.
 
Same with liberal news outlets. What they chose to report or not report, and how they decide to "frame" that picture has a huge political effect.
 
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