When Donald Trump surprised the world by winning the 2016 election, liberals clung to the idea that his victory was illegitimate because Hillary Clinton won the popular vote. According to a psychologist who supported Clinton in 2016, however, Google's bias in Clinton's favor may remove even that symbolic victory from her.
Almost all of Clinton's popular vote margin could be attributed to Google bias, making her win "negligible." Dr. Robert Epstein, a psychologist who earned his Ph.D. at Harvard, actually reported this finding last year, but he explains how it works in the upcoming film "
The Creepy Line."
Epstein made a stir in 2015 by
reporting in Politico that Google could "rig" the 2016 election. This story discussed the results of his study, which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). That study found that "biased search ranking can easily shift the voting preferences of undecided voters from 20% or more — up to 80% in some demographic groups."
In a
white paper published by the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology in June 2017, Epstein followed up on this PNAS study, suggesting that Clinton's popular vote margin was almost entirely attributable to pro-Clinton bias at Google.
"Extrapolating from the mathematics introduced in this report ... the lead author of the PNAS study [Epstein himself] predicted that a pro-Clinton bias in Google's search results would, over time, shift at least 2.6 million votes to Clinton. She won the popular vote in the November election by 2,864,974 votes," Epstein wrote with his co-author Ronald E. Robertson.
"Without the pro-Clinton bias in Google's search results, her win margin in the popular vote would have been negligible," Epstein wrote.
