How Google Could Rig the 2016 Election

[Karl Frederick]

Just when you thought you were well informed because you get your news from the Internet . . .

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/08/how-google-could-rig-the-2016-election-121548_full.html


"In the final days of a campaign, fortunes are spent on media blitzes directed at a handful of counties where swing voters will determine the winners in the all-important swing states. What a waste of resources! The right person at Google could influence those key voters more than any stump speech could; there is no cheaper, more efficient or subtler way to turn swing voters than SEME. SEME also has one eerie advantage over billboards: when people are unaware of a source of influence, they believe they weren’t being influenced at all; they believe they made up their own minds."

[podfish]

Just when you thought you were well informed because you get your news from the Internet . . .
anyone who feels that way is a lost cause already...

"In the final days of a campaign, fortunes are spent on media blitzes directed at a handful of counties where swing voters will determine the winners in the all-important swing states. What a waste of resources! The right person at Google could influence those key voters more than any stump speech could; there is no cheaper, more efficient or subtler way to turn swing voters than SEME. SEME also has one eerie advantage over billboards: when people are unaware of a source of influence, they believe they weren’t being influenced at all; they believe they made up their own minds."there's one big flaw in these guys' argument - and I think they know it, but they're writing a public-interest article, not a research paper here. I'm sure they can shift peoples' perceptions by shifting the search results. That's broadly the same principle as is used by all advertisers - shape people's exposure to anything and it starts seeming 'normal' and thus the preferred choice.

But very few people just google the various politicians when they decide how to vote (no, I won't reveal my sources for that statistic). And that's the basis of the research they summarize in their article - shaping people's search experience.
There are a lot of other filters (most notoriously Fox News, but really, also the Comedy Channel these days) that shape perceptions of voters. And people rarely ever believe they've been influenced by anything but their own perspicacity, so nothing special about the google-technique in that direction either.
So this is right up there with the hacked voting machines as a scary technical threat. Frankly I'm more concerned about simple things, like ensuring long lines at polling places in districts that don't vote with the party currently with the power to set voting rules. I'm from Chicago, so maybe that's why the time-tested techniques seem so much more effective and reliable.