[ET] What happened to the gigantic red wave that was supposed to crush the Democrats in the midterm elections? Every Republican in the country is blaming everyone else for this disaster, but almost no one is looking in the right place—and that’s exactly how the Big Tech companies like it.Based on my team’s research, Google, and to a lesser extent, Facebook and other tech monopolies, not only took steps to shift millions of votes to Democrats in the midterms, but they are using their influence to spread rumors and conspiracy theories to make sure people look everywhere for explanations—except at them.
Over a period of months, Google nudged undecided voters toward voting blue by showing people politically biased content in their search engine, suppressing content they didn’t want people to see, recommending left-leaning videos on YouTube (pdf) (which Google owns), allegedly sending tens of millions of emails to people’s spam boxes, and sending go-vote reminders on their home page mainly to liberal and moderate voters.
These manipulations (and others) don’t affect voters with strong points of view, but they can have an enormous impact on voters who are undecided (pdf)—the people who decide the outcomes of close elections.
In particular, we were tracking what Google employees call "ephemeral experiences"—content that appears briefly, affects people, and then disappears. In 2018, in emails that leaked from the company, Googlers were discussing how they might use ephemeral experiences to change people’s views about Trump’s travel ban. They know how powerful ephemeral experiences can be. That’s one of the most closely held secrets of Google’s management.Many years ago, there were articles about how TV was sneeking fractional-second advertising messages into your TV. Maybe Congress taxed them out of existence.
| They called it subliminal seduction in the early 1970s. The key image was a glass of whiskey on the rocks with female body parts air-brushed onto the shadows in the ice cubes. See the book on the subject here. Nowadays they call it nudging, and applying it to all sorts of behaviours beyond mere purchasing decisions. |
How will we ever know if anyone ever reads this article?
In 2020, we reported our findings to members of Congress, and on Nov. 5, 2020, three U.S. senators sent an intimidating letter (pdf) to the CEO of Google that summarized our data. As a result, Google turned off its manipulations. In the Georgia Senate runoffs that followed the presidential election, no one received a go-vote reminder from Google.
But we weren’t so lucky this time around. The article I published just before the election had no effect on Google, and this year, we couldn’t find a member of Congress to send a warning letter, although we came close.
So the fix was in!
That’s why the red wave fizzled—because Google had its digital thumb on the scale for months before the elections.