Election security

Psychologist: Big Tech Will Use “Subliminal Methods” to Shift 15 Million Votes on Election Day


After the 2016 presidential election, Epstein surmised that search engine bias shifted 2-3 million votes in Hillary Clinton’s favor, and he warns that the number in 2020 could be five times that amount.

The author says that Google and other social media giants “can shift opinions and votes in numerous ways that people can’t detect” via “a wide variety of subliminal methods of persuasion that can, in minutes, shift the voting preferences of 20 percent or more of undecided voters without anyone having the slightest idea they’ve been manipulated.”

A leak of Google emails to the Wall Street Journal back in 2018 already exposed how Google engineers had sought to investigate how they could manipulate a user’s “ephemeral experiences” to change their mind on the Trump travel ban.

“Ephemeral experiences are those fleeting ones we have every day when we view online content that’s generated on-the-fly and isn’t stored anywhere: newsfeeds, search suggestions, search results, and so on,” writes Epstein. “No authority can go back in time to see what search suggestions or search results you were shown, but dozens of randomized, controlled, double-blind experiments I’ve conducted show that such content can dramatically shift opinions and voting preferences. See the problem?”