How Google manipulates your search results and influences elections worldwide.

The Minister of the interior in the Netherlands on Oct. 18th 2019 responded to a motion adopted in parliament last year, that called to investigate the ‘effects of social media and internet search engines on our elections’. But rather than answering the question that was asked in the motion, she responded by informing Dutch Parliament of her intent to ‘preemptively prevent disinformation from spreading’, referring to a report she added that labels some hundred Dutch alternative media outlets as outlets of hyperpartisan junknews.

Over the past seven years dr. Robert Epstein however did investigate this matter by doing two kinds of research. One goes into the ‘Search Engine Manipulation Effect', in which he substantiates to what extent biased search engine result will shift voters opinion. The other is that the actual answers that Google provides voters worldwide with, are in fact biased on a scale that has shifted millions of votes and will do even more in future elections. In Café Weltschmerz, Robert Epstein explains to Rico Brouwer how this kind of votes manipulation works, how it is a threat to democracies worldwide and how it may be amended by US Congress or the European Union. The solution is simple. Epstein: ‘They would simply declare that Google’s index, the database that they use to generate search results, must be a public commons’.

The database underlying Google’s search engine is the most extensive database in the world, however it contains content that was scraped from other people’s websites. So the content in the database isn’t eve theirs.

For those searching for alternative search platforms or apps, some are listed on: https://switching.software/replace/google-search/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mu5SqnHkPbo