RUTHFULLY YOURS

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Google and Facebook have tremendous power to influence billions of people, without them even knowing it. An upcoming film documents how they can make companies rich, they can suppress information, and they can sway an election. They can even suggest thoughts and sway culture. This is the kind of power kings, emperors, and even dictators of yesteryear would envy, if they knew it existed.

“Throughout human history, tragically, leaders, ideologies, and belief systems have arisen that want to have total control over our lives, they want to remake human nature,” Peter Schweizer, New York Times bestselling author and writer for the upcoming film “The Creepy Line,” told PJ Media. He mentioned Benito Mussolini, Vladimir Lenin, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Mao Zedong.

“They all had police forces, they killed millions of people — tens of millions of people, in some cases,” Schweizer noted. “I’m not suggesting companies like Facebook and Google do that, but these companies do have control or influence over us that those dictators and leaders would dream about.”

“All the crude propaganda that they engaged in, the radio broadcasts, the leaflets, the sort of hypnotic speeches that they would give, pale in comparison with the ability for Google to nudge and to steer us in directions they want us to go and we don’t necessarily want to go,” the author explained.

Facebook and Google “do that by sifting our information, determining what we see and what we don’t see, they also do that by censoring information, and they nudge us in directions that they want us to go.”

“This is enormous power,” Schweizer said. “It’s the sort of power of Big Brother in ‘1984,’ and it’s the sort of power that these totalitarians from the last century would have loved and dreamed of having. They have power over the news and information that we get and the thoughts that we start to form.”

“The film is called ‘The Creepy Line’ because we believe that Facebook and Google are doing things that are out of bounds with what we expect from companies,” Schweizer explained. The phrase comes from a speech in which Eric Schmidt, then the CEO of Google, said his company likes to “get right up to the creepy line, but not cross it.”

“They never define what the creepy line is, but our view and attitude is that they cross the creepy line all the time,” he told PJ Media. “They have the ability to sway and influence people, and they admit this. They brag about it. It gives them a power over the control of information, it gives them the power of suggestion, and it gives them the power to have a dramatic effect on elections.”

M.A. Taylor, director of “The Creepy Line,” told PJ Media how this power works. He explained that Robert Epstein — a psychologist who earned his Ph.D. at Harvard — has extensively researched the search engine manipulation effect (SEME), discovering that Google’s search engine “can actually sway your opinion.”

“If I type a character in the search bar and suggestions come up, if they’re all positive, they’ll lead to positive web pages which will lead to a positive effect. If you have a negative in there, that negative is likely to get ten to fifteen times more clicks, bringing up negative pages,” Taylor told PJ Media.

Google gives users ten search results on the first page, and it delivers them in ranks from one to ten, with the top result regarded the most reliable. This involves two biases, Taylor explained. First, it has to sift through results to give the top ten, then it has to choose the most reliable result for number 1. Users want this ranking for the most reliable basic information for searches like, “What is the capital of France?”

“This becomes problematic when you talk about things like candidates or issues, because that algorithm has to make that decision about who’s the best candidate or who should you vote for and things like that,” Taylor said. “That’s where it becomes problematic, because we don’t really know what the algorithm is doing to give us these results.”

Robert Epstein ran an experiment, using a search engine to measure the impact of bias on Americans who had no knowledge of a particular issue — like Australia’s 2010 election, for example. “He thought it would be, we put all positive searches for one candidate, they’ll shift two or three percent,” the director said. “It actually shifted 48 percent.”

Epstein first thought this huge result was a mistake, but he ran the study again, and the shift got bigger, 63 percent! He even figured out how to mask the bias by adding one positive search result for the other candidate into a list of results favoring his opponent.

The psychologist has run this experiment in India and with the 2016 U.S. presidential election. He found evidence of bias, and conservatives would not be surprised to find that the bias favored Hillary Clinton.       CONTINUE AT SITE