The Google corporation is attempting to “reprogram” humanity, Robert Epstein, Ph.D. from Harvard University, a leading psychologist and researcher at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology in California, said in a conversation with Lenta.ru. In his opinion, the Internet giant has all the possibilities for this.
According to Epstein, Google is no longer just a large Internet directory, as it was before, but a corporation that monitors humanity through search, mail correspondence and many other services (more than 200 in total), collects and processes arrays of personal data of users.
The company’s goals were revealed in a leaked eight-minute video titled The Selfish Ledger. It said that with the help of the collected data, it is possible not only to predict user behavior, but also to change it, pushing people to “correct” decisions. Epstein calls this approach a serious threat to democracy.
Research by the Ph.D. shows that Google has already taken advantage of its capabilities. In particular, the corporation tried to influence the outcome of the election in favor of the Democrats, who, according to Epstein, support Google. “We have experienced the work of this mechanism on ourselves during the collection of data before the 2020 presidential elections in the United States,” he said. Then Epstein’s team developed a system for monitoring what people see on screens.
“During the race, we saw a significant bias in Google search results in favor of Democrats. We made this information public in November, a few days before the elections, and forced Google to stop manipulating, ”says the scientist. After, in the 2021 Senate elections, Epstein recorded that Google search results suddenly became unbiased.
Recent research by Epstein shows that if, during an election, search results are biased in favor of one of the candidates, then this affects the choice of 63 percent of undecided voters. Epstein’s team estimates that in 2015, up to 25 percent of election results worldwide were determined by Google search engines.
More details about the scale of surveillance of a person on the Internet – in Epstein’s big interview with “Lente.ru”. The material is published as part of a large-scale special project “Algorithm. Who controls you? ” – a comprehensive study on how the algorithms of social networks, instant messengers and other Internet services affect society, politics and global world processes. In six parts of the project, it is analyzed in detail how the content ranking system in social networks affects the real life of millions of people: it imperceptibly changes a person’s attitude to love, family, friendship, society, and affects the intellectual abilities of people. Besides, on the YouTube channel “Lenta.ru” a three-part documentary series is published, which explores who and how manipulates humanity with the help of algorithms, how they change reality, what dangers they pose to the world and how humanity confronts these challenges.