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Breaking the Information Monopoly?
This story is not yet trending on Google news. (I’ll be curious to see if it does, although I won’t draw any conclusions from it.)
Robert Epstein is a research psychologist. (I’ve drawn this conclusion by using Google to look him up and peruse his publications.) Here’s his Wikipedia page. (It was the top-ranked entry when I searched for “research psychologist Robert Epstein.”)
It says he was born on June 19, 1953. He’s “an American psychologist, professor, author, and journalist.” It also says has a doctorate from Harvard. I believe all of that, although I’ve confirmed none of it independently. I also believe this, though I haven’t confirmed it independently:
In 2012, Epstein publicly disputed with Google Search over a security warning placed on links to his website. His website, which features mental health screening tests, was blocked for serving malware that could infect visitors to the site. Epstein emailed “Larry Page, Google’s chief executive; David Drummond, Google’s legal counsel; Dr. Epstein’s congressman; and journalists from The New York Times, The Washington Post, Wired, and Newsweek.” In it, Epstein threatened legal action if the warning concerning his website was not removed, and denied that any problems with his website existed. Several weeks later, Epstein admitted his website had been hacked, but still blamed Google for tarnishing his name and not helping him find the infection.
Epstein has just published a piece in Politico warning that Google might throw the 2016 election:
America’s next president could be eased into office not just by TV ads or speeches, but by Google’s secret decisions, and no one—except for me and perhaps a few other obscure researchers—would know how this was accomplished.
Research I have been directing in recent years suggests that Google, Inc., has amassed far more power to control elections—indeed, to control a wide variety of opinions and beliefs—than any company in history has ever had. 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, according to experiments I conducted recently with Ronald E. Robertson.
You knew about this research already, of course. I’ve brought it up before.
Funny thing is that the first four or five times I saw a reference to him, it didn’t occur to me to look him up. After seeing this reported again today, I finally decided to look into it more carefully.
Here’s the full paper on PNAS: The search engine manipulation effect (SEME) and its possible impact on the outcomes of elections. His co-author is Ronald E. Robertson; if you throw his name in Google, you’ll find his LinkedIn page first, and you probably won’t do any further searching. (I basically believe everything Robertson says about himself there, too, although I’ve confirmed none of it.) My willingness to believe what I find in the top-ranked search result confirms what they suggest in their paper:
Studies using eye-tracking technology have shown that people generally scan search engine results in the order in which the results appear and then fixate on the results that rank highest, even when lower-ranked results are more relevant to their search. Higher-ranked links also draw more clicks, and consequently people spend more time on Web pages associated with higher-ranked search results. A recent analysis of ∼300 million clicks on one search engine found that 91.5% of those clicks were on the first page of search results, with 32.5% on the first result and 17.6% on the second. The study also reported that the bottom item on the first page of results drew 140% more clicks than the first item on the second page. These phenomena occur apparently because people trust search engine companies to assign higher ranks to the results best suited to their needs, even though users generally have no idea how results get ranked.
That more or less describes what I did when I decided that I’d like to know more about their research, so no conflict with intuition there.
I’ve now read the whole paper. I do think they’re raising a serious concern. That said, there’s a limit to the amount of research I can do quickly. You see, when I search for more information about Robert Epstein, for example, I hit a wall very quickly:
Some results may have been removed under data protection law in Europe. Learn more
Just curious: What happens when those of you who aren’t in Europe search under these researchers’ names? Do you learn the same things I do? Do you draw similar conclusions?
Published in General
I’ll bet you are. In fact, I’m surprised that anyone here uses any non-Google search engine. But let’s see.
I don’t hate them, but I’m concerned by anything with that much power. We don’t have a lot of inherited wisdom to which to appeal when it comes to something like Google. It’s obviously different from other public utilities.
Of course, this extends to YouTube, a Google company, as well. My video views are mostly about Catholicism, conservative political stuff, and music. Yet, my suggested videos always seem to include John Oliver, homosexual teenagers announcing their orientation to their father, and “what is female masculinity” (today’s suggestion).
Remember a decade or so ago when we said the internet had abolished the liberal stranglehold on news and culture?
I didn’t mean entirely to demoralize you. But I do increasingly feel that this issue should be getting more attention than it does. I suspect that the initial dream of the Internet — that we’d get an Army of Davids out of it to beat big media, as Glenn Reynolds put it — may have been astonishingly naive. I’d like to speak to him now and ask him what he makes of this. Maybe I should drop him a note; that would be an interesting subject for a podcast, wouldn’t it?
I have a friend whose full-time job (and the company he works for isn’t exactly strapped for cash) is, essentially (although I know I’m summarizing it crudely), manipulating google search results on behalf of clients. It is big, big money if you can have your school, for instance, pop up toward the top of a search for “radiology programs.”
I see that as a problem, although I’m not 100% certain what my initial response would be. Probably I’d go ask Russ Roberts. The idea that there is something to be done legislatively strikes me as wrongheaded. But I’d wonder if the Google juggernaut could be halted (or otherwise limited) in other ways. Certainly, my use of Chrome is no help. Although… my default search engine in Chrome is Bing. A pointless gesture, I know, but still.
Funny; I was just going to agree with Titus. To be fair, though, I don’t know how much of this is self-selection, having lived and worked in California for 22 years or so now, or how much is filtered through the lens of a Libertarianism I’m entirely confident has been radicalized during the Obama régime.
My question: in what way do you believe Google is “manipulating” political search results? All I see is research that shows what, having worked at an e-tailer, I already knew very, very well: you want your product/service to be on the first page of results, as high as possible. We had guys who could tell you what words, in what position in a Google query, would result in what revenue, on average, over what window. And that window was pretty short, because lots of other guys are also competing to be high on the first page.
To me, the answer’s obvious: your guy(s) need to be good at SEO. Same with campaign canvasing.
Oh, wait…
Claire & All,
I am sorry that I take a different tack to all of this but I’m sticking to my version. Search engines depend on the fundamentals of information science. Google is remarkably neutral in its policies and most certainly never wants to intervene unless illegal or grossly immoral behavior is exhibited.
The very nature of internet advertising is search optimization. When someone searches on a “key word” the results will be presented in a particular order. That people inspect the first few items first isn’t remarkable or something that requires a great deal of research to understand.
Google does two things. One, it sells advertising that upon every searched key word will put your paid site advertisement with link up in a grayed area to the right of your search results column. This is not manipulative as these are clearly marked as paid advertising results. The second thing Google does is catalog every site on the internet. This is the only way that you could possibly get the near instantaneous response to your search requests. The cataloging of your site is where the mystery usually lends itself to paranoia. By adding key words to your site in particular locations within the site you can enhance your catalog entry. This will result in a far greater likelihood of your site being placed high in the search results column.
After the two things I’ve mentioned the number of hits that any site or page gets makes the likelihood of them appearing high in the search results column go up also. Putting all of this together requires both advertising and internet search savvy. My recommendation to any serious political campaign would be to get some really experienced internet advertising people on the team pronto.
By and large Google can’t do anything about this one way or the other. We should get smarter and play the game. Those tags at the bottom of the post are a lot more important than anybody realizes.
If you have a story to tell you can’t just whisper it down a well.
Regards,
Jim
My bet is Google knows your zip code from geolocation, and from your search patterns is able to infer your sex and your age. Birth date, sex, and zip code are enough to uniquely identify about 87% of U.S. citizens, so the big issue is correlating your inferred age with your birth date. Own your home? Then it’s a matter of public record.
I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again: if it’s privacy you want, you have to act like Edward Snowden.
I use DuckDuckGo, which is significantly better for software developers.
This is SEO (Search Engine Optimization), AKA “advertising.” It is absolutely no different than competing for billboard space in Times Square, or at Hollywood and Sunset. The real estate’s virtual, yes. But its desirability still has a Zipf distribution, just like damn near everything else.
GGofG,
Why yes exactly. hmmmm….you wouldn’t consider a little moonlighting would you? You know with the a really good SEO strategy we could (stage whisper) “Take Over the World”.
Regards,
Jim
Claire,
We spoke about Facebooks manipulation toward social/political change a couple of months ago:
It’s not arguable that Facebook and it’s competitors use “trending” algorithms to determine what you see in your feed or search results. There are many variables, which start at how much is published about specific politicians, proposition and issues. For example, (I’m assuming) Trump will be in your search results and FB feed much more likely than Graham. Is that not the system relying on news that creates it’s own monopoly? And how is that different from what the MSM does?
I think there is another reason we do this: Internet security.
I’ve crashed two computers with malware or viruses. So I have very tight security settings, and my tech guys have always told me the viruses and malware are carried in the third-party ads on otherwise-legitimate websites. Thus my ad block add-ons. :)
I spend a lot of time researching via the Internet, and when I get back search results, I go only to well-known, well-supervised websites like the Wall Street Journal. I go to a Wikipedia page (often), but I don’t click the links on it. Frankly, I can usually get the information I need just in the search results themselves. The answer I’m looking for is in the line from the document that Google shows me. Too funny.
Viruses and malware are top reasons why the MSM retains its grip on the common narrative people base their judgments on.
That has not changed with the advent of our Internet lives. It’s still about credibility, not just raw information.
Because not all of them would be “elected by Google”? Also, everyone seems to be forgetting that Google is an international company; there are plenty of foreign governments that would be more than happy to have an excuse to crack down on it.
The problem with the “conspiracy X survives by buying off all the politicians” is that there are an awful lot of politicians in the world. Even if we restrict ourselves to the U.S., there are hundreds of elected offices at the federal level and thousands at the state. That’s a lot of people to buy off, and let’s face it, politicians have a tendency to not stay bought off.
You weaponize the Army of Davids by infecting them with the skeptic virus and giving them some work arounds to get alternative data from that officially blessed by Google or government.
I’m not saying they’re “bought off”, I’m saying politicians who have been elected are unlikely to say “I may have had an unfair advantage, let’s pass legislation to take that advantage away”. They probably wouldn’t even say “unfair advantage”, just “the facts on the ground must reflect the reality that I was the superior campaigner and candidate.”
Your tech guys are—well, the technical term is “full of [CoC].”
The advertising/affiliate marketing industry has enormous disincentives to allow themselves to become vectors for viri/malware, and are not staffed by technological ignorami. Having been a tech lead at one major such organization, I can assure you that if anyone on my staff had allowed such things, whether by ignorance, negligence, or fraud, they’d have lost their job on the spot.
That said, there’s not much we (as an affiliate marketing organization) could do about phishing attacks/advertising malware linked to not through our network, but nevertheless by publishers on our roster. We always made a good faith effort to notify our publishers when we did discover such things one way or another, and I’m sure if the problem persisted it would eventually result in a difficult conversation with their account manager. But the number of times viri/malware went through our network between affiliate and publisher is 0, or close enough to it to be statistically insignificant.
I’ll go farther: at least in the Google context, they’re correct in making that claim.
Yes. I agree. I’m not saying it’s a horrible thing, only that Google wields a great deal of influence. Same if, say, you had a single billboard operator. As I mentioned in my comment, I don’t necessarily see it as a problem (or, certainly not one that calls for regulation).
This doesn’t seem all that troubling to me. Taking great risk to nibble at the margins in an election for a President that doesn’t have all that much power to help you.
What troubles me is the little virtual suburban communities where everyone is basically like each other. Like Ricochet. No offense.
Well, we don’t know how Google is manipulating search rankings, because their PageRank algorithm is proprietary and closed.
But we do know they hired Al Gore to help ‘optimize’ their global warming search – do you think that was an ideologically neutral plan? If so, why would they hire Al Gore, who doesn’t know a damned thing about science, and not, say, a panel of climate scientists?
We also know they are trying to incorporate ‘truth level’ in their page rank (pushback from the market slowed them down, but my understanding is that they would like to make the level of ‘truth’ on a page part of the search algorithm.)
Both of these are examples of manipulating rankings not based on an objective criteria like number of inward links, but on subjective criteria like ‘truth’. That’s very dangerous. The web itself is a complex system, and all politics aside the last thing you want in such a system is a core piece that limits diversity.
SEO isn’t going to help a heterodox page move up in rankings if the rankings are based on how many orthodox sites link to you. SEO won’t help you move your Rick Perry support page up the list if Google arbitrarily decides that Rick Perry is an example of BadThink and uses brute force to drive your page down the list.
The fact is, Google’s search algorithms wield incredible power over social direction, yet they are completely opaque and proprietary. That alone, absent any evidence of malfeasance, should cause us to worry.
The same can be said about Facebook and their attempts as social experimentation through manipulation of user’s feeds. This is extraordinarily dangerous stuff when carried out by a company with enough reach to manipulate world opinion in a non-transparent way.
You mean like iHeartMedia, formerly Clear Channel Communications? ;-)
OK, Google “has a lot of influence,” although I’d say instead they have a lot of penetration. All it means is your guys need to be better at SEO than the other guys. The fact that that calculus tilts crazily in favor of Silicon Valley leftists rather than the (horrible, awful, no-good) Silicon Valley libertarians—both of them—is actually a good barometer for what the political distribution is, as opposed to what breathless Salon and Slate and Vox articles say it is.
This is, for me, another data point in my “America is a dysfunctional social democracy” thesis. 51% of the electorate would give Obama a 3rd term, because Obamacare, gay marriage, and economic recovery. That maybe 33% of us have an OMGWTFBBQ reaction to this, and another 16% have a “meh” reaction, means what, exactly? Well, with a two-party non-parliamentary winner-takes-all system, it means we’re screwed, and the best way I’ve found to keep my sanity is to think about being old in some place that’s nice to old Americans, cheap, temperate, and slow.
Not true, either in literal terms (the first link is to Page’s paper) or strictly analytical ones.
Yes.
Because search engines deal in words, and Al Gore is in a good position to help any search engine developer more accurately recognize words and phrases that are relevant to climate-related searches.
Wouldn’t we all like to?
Relevance based on PageRank is already subjective. You already have to worry about distributed botnets manipulating links.
Your argument is with Zipf distributions, then, not Google. See if Bing or DuckDuckGo are any different.
Search ‘abortion’ on Bing & google—I get different results between the two. 5 min.later, I searched bing again & the results were different than the first Bing search. ( with my phone)
The land has not called forth the ideology, nor are the people who start companies that end up incredibly wealthy & influential or powerful come from the land. I cannot make any sense of what you’re saying: Is it some kind of negative statement–people not of the ideology would avoid the land?
Are you saying, IT is tied with an ideology or something like it? Does not that contradicts your previous?
If that’s your game: What’s expected of the campaigns? What outcome measurements have you heard of? Any consideration of possible bad outcomes?
If you imply, they just pay a market-tester to come up with whatever idea tests well, I cannot believe that. Maybe I’m just too fond of my ol’ man paranoia.
This is the funniest thing I’ve read you to say, except possibly where you suggested that you might agree with me. That, too, was a gas.
Is it somehow obvious in your secret councils of the heart that Mr. Gore, Jr. is the guy to hire? Have you any kind of knowledge that you could share as to why he would be the most competent guy to do the job, where job is not just ‘anything for which you can get paid’, & figuring in the money involved? I have never heard anyone even whisper that there is some argument to be made there & I hope you’re the guy who’s done the figuring & can share-
I’m glad you’re amused!
There’s little question in my mind that Mr. Gore has extensive knowledge of how various environmental technologies, movements, and people are described, both by themselves and their opponents, or how they relate to each other, or how they relate to both real and potential public policy. If I were developing a knowledge base on these topics, Al Gore is absolutely one of the people I’d want to talk to.
How in Dante’s hell is this guy any more knowledgeable than any number of his aides? At what price could this guy be worth whatever you suppose he knows?
My mistake – I thought ‘PageRank’ was the name for Google’s complete search algorithm. The PageRank algorithm is indeed open, but it’s only one of the tools Google uses to rank pages, and their full suite of algorithms is proprietary. Therefore, the general point I was making is still correct.
Al Gore is also notoriously biased and a polarizing figure. I would not trust his judgement to be impartial in this area, and therefore I wouldn’t want him involved.
In a similar vein, Google should probably not hire Karl Rove to help optimize political searches, even though he’s a fountain of political knowledge. The chance of knowing or unknowing bias creeping into his results is too high. Or, if I thought I couldn’t find an unbiased authoritative source, I’d figure out a way to include people from both the right and left and average out their results or something.
You seem to think that Google search results come from an unimpeachable, mathematically sound, unbiased algorithm. In fact, Google is constantly tweaking its algorithms in novel ways, and then they use testers to try the new algorithms and report on how useful the search results are. The ones that score high get added to the mix.
If you can’t see the opportunity for bias to creep into the process, well…
Here’s Google’s own page describing how they construct their algorithms.
Here’s an article about France attempting to force Google to publish the details of their algorithms: France wants to force Google to reveal its search algorithm.
Not exactly. What I meant by “analytically” is people can, and do, game Google, and we euphemistically call that “SEO.”
Of course he’s not impartial, but neither will any of your other sources be.
That’s exactly what happens.
The human feedback is just one more input to what remains an essentially Bayesian machine learning system—famously so. The priors can be whatever you or Google want; feedback from billions of users corrects it over time.
That’s asinine.
Sure. But I think SEO is something slightly different than what we’re talking about. SEO is all about figuring out how to maximize your own pages by taking advantage of what you know about Google’s algorithms. What I’m talking about is Google itself modifying its algorithms to favour a certain type of result.
Maybe I’m being paranoid, but I thought people were paranoid when they said they thought the last unemployment numbers before the last election were gamed. Turned out I was wrong – they were. A lot of people thought it was conspiratorial to suggest that the IRS would target conservatives. They were wrong, and the IRS did.
So when a company which is largely run by liberals has control over an opaque algorithm which can flip elections, I’m not exactly comfortable that all is well and we can trust the math. As Facebook’s ‘pride’ avatar and their feed manipulation tests show, some of these companies are perfectly willing to use their power to influence opinion.
So you think that this human feedback is completely irrelevant over time? That if they get it wrong the algorithm will re-adjust to reflect some objective reality? If so, why would Google even bother with it?
That we can agree on. The better answer is to encourage competition in the search engine space.