{"id":400991,"date":"2019-03-23T13:55:27","date_gmt":"2019-03-23T12:55:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/prison-planet-com-google-influenced-midterm-elections-may-have-cost-republicans-seats-study\/"},"modified":"2019-03-23T13:55:27","modified_gmt":"2019-03-23T12:55:27","slug":"prison-planet-com-google-influenced-midterm-elections-may-have-cost-republicans-seats-study","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/prison-planet-com-google-influenced-midterm-elections-may-have-cost-republicans-seats-study\/","title":{"rendered":"Prison Planet.com \u00bb Google Influenced Midterm Elections, May Have Cost Republicans Seats: Study"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Zero Hedge<\/strong><\/a>
March 23, 2019<\/p>\n

New research reveals that\u00a0Google built biases into its search results that influenced the 2018 midterm elections \u2013 possibly costing Republicans three congressional districts.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

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First things first \u2013 the study was conducted by\u00a0Dr. Robert Epstein \u2013 a San Diego-based Harvard Ph.D. who founded the Cambridge Center<\/a> for Behavioral Studies. He\u2019s also a\u00a0Senior Research Psychologist<\/a> at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology (AIBRT), a UCSD visiting scholar, and served as editor-in-chief of\u00a0Psychology Today.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

He also supported Hillary Clinton in 2016 (just like Google<\/a>!).<\/p>\n

Down to the findings:\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n

Epstein and AIBRT analyzed Google searches linked to three\u00a0highly competitive southern California congressional races<\/strong>\u00a0in which Democrats won, and found that Google\u2019s \u201cclear democrat bias<\/strong>\u201d may have flipped the seats away from Republican candidates. According to the study, at least 35,455 undecided voters within the three California districts\u00a0may have been persuaded to vote Democrat<\/strong>\u00a0due to the biased Google search results.<\/p>\n

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Epstein says that in the days leading up to the 2018 midterms, he was able to\u00a0preserve \u201cmore than 47,000 election-related searches on Google, Bing, and Yahoo, along with the nearly 400,000 web pages to which the search results linked.\u201d<\/p>\n

Analysis of this data showed a clear pro-Democrat bias in election-related Google search results as compared to competing search engines<\/strong>. Users performing Google searches related to the three congressional races the study focused on were significantly more likely to see pro-Democrat stories and links at the top of their results.<\/p>\n

As Epstein\u2019s previous studies have shown, this can have a\u00a0huge impact<\/a>\u00a0on the decisions of undecided voters<\/strong>, who often assume that their search results are unbiased. Epstein has called this the Search Engine Manipulation Effect (SEME). \u2013Breitbart<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n