Google isn’t swaying US voters, but it could

The search engine and social media networks are the main conduits of information today — they can help spread it, but can also censor it

ong before artificial intelligence brings about the singularity, algorithms are having an influence over our most important decisions, including which candidate to back in elections. The danger this could go too far is real and we probably need some well-considered regulatory intervention.

Last week, American psychologist Robert Epstein published a harsh article about Google’s alleged manipulation of its search suggestion feature. When you start typing in Google’s search window, it suggests ways to autocomplete the request. Epstein showed, for example, that when a user entered “Hillary Clinton is ...,” Google suggested finishing the sentence with “is winning” or “is awesome”. Other search engines, Bing and Yahoo, completed the sentence differently: “Hillary Clinton is a liar.”

Epstein went on to give other examples of the purported bias and claimed that his research showed that the manipulation of search suggestions could “shift between 800,000 and 3.2 million votes” in the United States presidential election.

There are several reasons to question Epstein’s claims. He has a history with Google, which blocked his website in 2012 because it detected a malware infection, and the dispute escalated into a public fight. I asked Epstein why he became interested in Google’s ability to manipulate search results, and he didn’t mention the episode, claiming a purely scientific curiosity. Next, the article was published by Sputnik, a Russian state-owned propaganda site. Epstein told me in an e-mail it was “an experiment, and it has worked out well so far: Multiple simultaneous translations, indexed everywhere (including on Google News), and they didn’t change a single word I wrote”. Still, I suspect the choice of publication instantly hurt Epstein’s credibility with the mainstream press: Among relatively popular outlets, only the British tabloid Daily Mail, Fox News and Breitbart picked up on the story.

Harsher on both

Finally, the most suggestive findings in Epstein’s piece are easily refuted. The suggestions are a moving target. I entered “Hillary Clinton is” into the Google search box on Wednesday and got “Hillary Clinton is dead” and “Hillary Clinton is toast” as the first results. The algorithm did suggest “awesome”, too, but then the suggestions for “Donald Trump is” were similar: “Donald Trump is dead” and “Donald Trump is orange” — but also “Donald Trump is going to win”.

The other search engines are harsher on both. Bing’s suggestions included completing the Trump request with “a lying racist” and “the antichrist” and one for Hillary with “a lying crook” and “a practising witch”. Epstein, however, is definitely on to something. I doubt anyone except the candidates themselves and their diehard supporters would want Google to suppress the insulting search options. I certainly don’t, and neither should voters who are still making up their minds.

Epstein is right about something more profound than the accusations that Google, whose founders and top executives lean Democratic, might be messing with various bits of search algorithms to skew results in favour of Hillary. It’s hard to make such charges stick. What’s more important is that Google has the ability to skew results without getting caught.

Google and the social networks are the main conduits of information in today’s world. They can help spread it, but they can also censor it, openly — as Google does with the autocomplete algorithm — or covertly. It may seem that the latter is too risky for the company’s reputation since it has competitors, and its search results can always be compared to theirs. Yet, such comparisons could prove nothing except that the different search companies’ algorithms are based on slightly different views of what’s relevant to a majority of users. After all, they have different user bases.

Disclosing these algorithms to governments and submitting to regulation that would ban the unfair tweaking of search tools would be fraught with dangers: Governments are themselves tempted to look for ways of skewing public opinion. And yet it’s wrong for society to depend so heavily on a handful of private companies for important information. The European Union has forced Google to make changes to its products; this interference hasn’t always been constructive, but it can serve as a starting point for figuring out how to keep the major digital platforms impartial.