The “fake news” problem is a lot bigger than most people realize, because it’s not just the news itself that’s blatantly biased and often flat-out false.
It’s the very system by which it’s delivered to you — and in Silicon Valley, they’re arming an invisible “thought police” system aimed straight at conservative voices.
Google, the search giant, was just fined $2.7 billion in Europe for manipulating its search engine results to drive sales to its own shopping comparison services and hurt its rivals.
“What Google has done is illegal under EU antitrust rules,” Margrethe Vestager, the European Union’s Competition Commissioner, said, according to The Guardian. “It has denied other companies the chance to compete on their merits and to innovate, and most importantly it has denied European consumers the benefits of competition, genuine choice and innovation.”
This might sound like a case about shopping.
But it’s not. It’s much, much more sinister.
This is just the tip of the iceberg, because Google has the power to manipulate search results about anything and everything.
One of Google’s top shopping competitors spelled it out very clearly.
“Although the record-breaking 2.42bn euro fine is likely to dominate the headlines, the prohibition of Google’s immensely harmful search manipulation practices is far more important,” Shivaun Raff, head of price comparison site (and Google competitor) Foundem, told the BBC.
“For well over a decade, Google’s search engine has played a decisive role in determining what most of us read, use and purchase online,” he said. “Left unchecked, there are few limits to this gatekeeper power.”
That’s exactly what’s at stake here.
It’s bad enough that it used that gatekeeper power to drive business to its own shopping websites and damage its competitors.
But if the company will go that far to drive sales, imagine how much further it would go to push its ideology by manipulating which stories you see and – just as importantly – which ones you don’t.
This isn’t just a matter of the news itself being biased.
It’s far more dangerous. Imagine if America’s paperboys didn’t just deliver the paper… but together, in secret, first pre-selected the news so you’d only get the stories that fit a liberal world view.
This gatekeeper power is so widespread that you’d never even know what you were missing!
That could manipulate views and — ultimately — votes, as experiments conducted by Robert Epstein, senior research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology showed all too clearly.
“Google’s search algorithm can easily shift the voting preferences of undecided voters by 20 percent or more – up to 80 percent in some demographic groups – with virtually no one knowing they are being manipulated,” he warned in an editorial in Politico in 2015.
That’s enough to easily swing any U.S. election. Indeed, it could swing nearly any election in any country.
And if you look at how it’s done, the basics sounds almost identical to the shopping scam that just cost the company $2.7 billion.
“The employees who constantly adjust the search giant’s algorithms are manipulating people every minute of every day,” Epstein wrote. “The adjustments they make increasingly influence our thinking – including, it turns out, our voting preferences.”
Shopping preferences one day, voting preferences the next.
Last year, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange warned that the company was heading there.
“Google is heavily integrated with Washington power, at a personal level and a business level,” Assange said, predicting that the company will “inevitably influence its audience.”
If anyone wants to investigate where election collusion, corruption and outright fraud could be taking place, they might want to start with the search engine.
There are 2.7 billion reasons to believe that this one ISN’T fake news.
— The Horn editorial team