Posted on 02/26/2016 12:23:30 PM PST by Pearls Before Swine
We have also learned something very disturbing – that search engines are influencing far more than what people buy and whom they vote for. We now have evidence suggesting that on virtually all issues where people are initially undecided, search rankings are impacting almost every decision that people make. ..... In one of our recent experiments, biased search results shifted people’s opinions about the value of fracking by 33.9 per cent.
..... Remember what the search algorithm is doing: in response to your query, it is selecting a handful of webpages from among the billions that are available, and it is ordering those webpages using secret criteria. Seconds later, the decision you make or the opinion you form – about the best toothpaste to use, whether fracking is safe, where you should go on your next vacation, who would make the best president, or whether global warming is real – is determined by that short list you are shown, even though you have no idea how the list was generated. .... We are living in a world in which a handful of high-tech companies, sometimes working hand-in-hand with governments, are not only monitoring much of our activity, but are also invisibly controlling more and more of what we think, feel, do and say. The technology that now surrounds us is not just a harmless toy; it has also made possible undetectable and untraceable manipulations of entire populations – manipulations that have no precedent in human history and that are currently well beyond the scope of existing regulations and laws. The new hidden persuaders are bigger, bolder and badder than anything Vance Packard ever envisioned.
(Excerpt) Read more at aeon.co ...
The gist of the article is a summary of what appears to be careful sociological research on the effects that a search engine provider can have on preferences by deliberately biasing the search results in favor of one or another side of an issue--think elections. According to the author, the effect is unusually large, and as far as he can tell, legal.
The author lists several of his own experiments, as well as several conducted by Facebook, on the strength of the effect in manipulating users. He claims it is virtually undetectable.
And, for conspiracy theorists, the author notes that Eric Schmidt, ex-CEO of Google, has formed a shadowy company to promote Hillary Clinton's election.
I didn't bother to check if I could excerpt the whole thing, as I think the author deserves web hits for this piece of work.
Startpage.com
Dogpile.
Clear all your cookies.
I was just talking to a guy that had been in Haiti. He said not any electricity or water or plumbing in a lot of places - but everyone gets a free cell phone and their is coverage everywhere. For controlling what the population sees and is told.
Lookit the global islameOluvfest. This is an ancient principality at work.
Why was Henry Fords Cannabis Car scrubbed? Because it didn't enrich satans lil playthings in the ME. Why did Nixon, and Ronnie fail to end our dependence on ME oil? Same reason.
Death and hatred to mankind, poisoning their brainwashed minds.
Might work for you or me, but we’re beyond influence. This is about hidden persuasion of the masses.
Yep. Thinking a search engine is doing it the good of the sheeple is naive.
Thousands of lines of code, people to maintain it, don’t generate revenue. Specific ways to target your users does. Hits per site, placement and traffic set the price.
bookmark
Boy a new Vance Packard is needed for this generation to write about the old and new hidden persuaders.
Very dangerous as Google gets about 95% of searches.
If the author is correct, it is a very serious problem. What is worse, is that we wouldn’t necessarily know. Who is to say this phenomenon hasn’t been exploited, or that the author and his coresearchers are the first to notice it?
This is a very scary article. I was very pleased when I did a search here (I was planning on posting it) that two people had already posted.
Now send it on to Facebook, friends.
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