Blacklists & manipulation: Researcher fights back against Google, Clinton & US election hijacking

Failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton is “in Google’s pocket,” but her legacy doesn’t have to include the destruction of US democracy, researcher Dr. Robert Epstein has pleaded after being smeared by the ex-First Lady.

After Clinton dismissed Google’s sizable role in swaying undecided voters in 2016 as “debunked,” Epstein urged the former Secretary of State to listen to his congressional testimony “for the sake of our democracy,” unleashing a torrent of tweets in an effort to set her straight. Enumerating the sins of Google, the psychologist implored Clinton to think of her “legacy.”

What might have been a mean-spirited joke coming from anyone else was an earnest plea coming from Epstein, whose “whole extended family” have been Clinton supporters for decades. Nevertheless, he dismantled both Clinton’s statement and the tweet from President Donald Trump that preceded it.

“Google should be sued” for throwing 16 million votes to Clinton, Trump had exulted – only for Epstein to point out there was no evidence proving Google’s manipulation was deliberate, and the maximum number of undecided voters swayed in his model for 2016 was 10.4 million.

However, “It doesn’t matter whether the bias in Google search results was deliberate or not. Once it appeared – which it did at least 6 months before the election – it began shifting opinions & votes without people’s knowledge & without leaving a paper trail,” Epstein tweeted. And perhaps just as important, Clinton surrounded herself with Google – both passively, through donations, and actively.

“Hillary has long depended on Google for both money and votes. Her largest donor in 2016 was Alphabet/Google,” Epstein pointed out, adding that “96% of 2016 campaign donations from Google employees went to Hillary.”

Epstein also posted a leaked email in which Google co-founder Eric Schmidt “offered to run Hillary’s tech campaign” in 2014 and ran a company in 2015 devoted to electing Clinton. And Schmidt’s tactics work – Clinton chief analytics officer Elan Kriegel credits the 2012 Obama tech team supervised by Schmidt with handing him half his margin of victory. Clinton’s 2016 campaign employed former Googler Stephanie Hannon as Chief Technology Officer – coincidence?

Apparently convinced he could change Clinton’s mind with the sheer power of data, Epstein summed up the Google threat into three points – the platform’s near-omniscient surveillance, its control over the information environment, and its manipulation of that environment.

“If you had a choice between preserving democracy and putting your candidate in office, which would you choose?” he asked – perhaps not the best choice of question for a woman whose party cheated to give her the nomination. But Epstein’s admiration for Clinton has not flagged – he closed out his tweetstorm with a photo of the two together, unsarcastically stating he had “always admired [her] as a self-sacrificing person who is trying to improve people’s lives,” almost – but not quite – getting ratio’d.

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