Dr. Robert Epstein on politics: what the evidence says · JRE #1768
SUBJECT: POLITICS
Not a true/false call. Every claim is logged with its sources; read the exhibits below.
we found enough bias on Google, but not Bing or Yahoo, to have shifted 78 million votes. That's spread across hundreds of elections, though, okay, with no one knowing.
What the evidence says 01 / RECORD
Epstein, a psychologist who coined the term Search Engine Manipulation Effect (SEME), has published one peer-reviewed study on this topic: a 2015 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) paper with Ronald Robertson showing in lab experiments that biased search rankings can shift undecided voters' preferences, and estimating that Google bias in the 2016 election could plausibly have shifted 2.6 to 10.4 million votes. The much larger 78-million figure cited in this clip (78.2 million in his own writings) comes from Epstein's 2018 midterm monitoring project, which he described in his 2019 U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee testimony as based on more than 47,000 preserved election-related searches on Google, Bing, and Yahoo, spread across hundreds of local and regional races. That estimate has not been published in a peer-reviewed journal or independently replicated, and the underlying monitoring data and methodology remain proprietary to Epstein's organization. Google has disputed Epstein's conclusions, stating it does not design or adjust its algorithms to influence elections. Because the 78-million-vote figure rests on unpublished, non-peer-reviewed monitoring data extrapolated from a limited, non-random sample rather than on verified election outcomes, it remains an unverified estimate rather than an established finding.