COLLECTIVE MADNESS


“Soft despotism is a term coined by Alexis de Tocqueville describing the state into which a country overrun by "a network of small complicated rules" might degrade. Soft despotism is different from despotism (also called 'hard despotism') in the sense that it is not obvious to the people."

Thursday, December 24, 2015

“Corporate Criminal” Hillary Clinton—and the reality of who has power in America.

HINT: Your vote is a joke. Here is Why:



How Google Could Rig the 2016 Election

Google has the ability to drive millions of votes to a candidate with no one the wiser.


By Robert Epstein
August 19, 2015



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 .

Given that many elections are won by small margins, this gives Google the power, right now, to flip upwards of 25 percent of the national elections worldwide. In the United States, half of our presidential elections have been won by margins under 7.6 percent, and the 2012 election was won by a margin of only 3.9 percent—well within Google’s control.


There are at least three very real scenarios whereby Google—perhaps even without its leaders’ knowledge—could shape or even decide the election next year. Whether or not Google executives see it this way, the employees who constantly adjust the search giant’s algorithms are manipulating people every minute of every day. The adjustments they make increasingly influence our thinking—including, it turns out, our voting preferences.


What we call in our research the Search Engine Manipulation Effect (SEME) turns out to be one of the largest behavioral effects ever discovered. Our comprehensive new study, just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), includes the results of five experiments we conducted with more than 4,500 participants in two countries. Because SEME is virtually invisible as a form of social influence, because the effect is so large and because there are currently no specific regulations anywhere in the world that would prevent Google from using and abusing this technique, we believe SEME is a serious threat to the democratic system of government.


According to Google Trends, at this writing Donald Trump is currently trouncing all other candidates in search activity in 47 of 50 states. Could this activity push him higher in search rankings, and could higher rankings in turn bring him more support? Most definitely—depending, that is, on how Google employees choose to adjust numeric weightings in the search algorithm. Google acknowledges adjusting the algorithm 600 times a year, but the process is secret, so what effect Mr. Trump’s success will have on how he shows up in Google searches is presumably out of his hands.
***
Our new research leaves little doubt about whether Google has the ability to control voters. In laboratory and online experiments conducted in the United States, we were able to boost the proportion of people who favored any candidate by between 37 and 63 percent after just one search session. The impact of viewing biased rankings repeatedly over a period of weeks or months would undoubtedly be larger.


In our basic experiment, participants were randomly assigned to one of three groups in which search rankings favored either Candidate A, Candidate B or neither candidate. Participants were given brief descriptions of each candidate and then asked how much they liked and trusted each candidate and whom they would vote for. Then they were allowed up to 15 minutes to conduct online research on the candidates using a Google-like search engine we created called Kadoodle.


Each group had access to the same 30 search results—all real search results linking to real web pages from a past election. Only the ordering of the results differed in the three groups. People could click freely on any result or shift between any of five different results pages, just as one can on Google’s search engine.


When our participants were done searching, we asked them those questions again, and, voilà: On all measures, opinions shifted in the direction of the candidate who was favored in the rankings. Trust, liking and voting preferences all shifted predictably.


More alarmingly, we also demonstrated this shift with real voters during an actual electoral campaign—in an experiment conducted with more than 2,000 eligible, undecided voters throughout India during the 2014 Lok Sabha election there—the largest democratic election in history, with more than 800 million eligible voters and 480 million votes ultimately cast. Even here, with real voters who were highly familiar with the candidates and who were being bombarded with campaign rhetoric every day, we showed that search rankings could boost the proportion of people favoring any candidate by more than 20 percent—more than 60 percent in some demographic groups.

Given how powerful this effect is, it’s possible that Google decided the winner of the Indian election.  Google’s own daily data on election-related search activity (subsequently removed from the Internet, but not before my colleagues and I downloaded the pages) showed that Narendra Modi, the ultimate winner, outscored his rivals in search activity by more than 25 percent for sixty-one consecutive days before the final votes were cast. That high volume of search activity could easily have been generated by higher search rankings for Modi.


Google’s official comment on SEME research is always the same: “Providing relevant answers has been the cornerstone of Google’s approach to search from the very beginning. It would undermine the people’s trust in our results and company if we were to change course.”


Could any comment be more meaningless? How does providing “relevant answers” to election-related questions rule out the possibility of favoring one candidate over another in search rankings? Google’s statement seems far short of a blanket denial that it ever puts its finger on the scales.
There are three credible scenarios under which Google could easily be flipping elections worldwide as you read this:
First, there is the Western Union Scenario: Google’s executives decide which candidate is best for us—and for the company, of course—and they fiddle with search rankings accordingly. There is precedent in the United States for this kind of backroom king-making. Rutherford B. Hayes, the 19th president of the United States, was put into office in part because of strong support by Western Union. In the late 1800s, Western Union had a monopoly on communications in America, and just before the election of 1876, the company did its best to assure that only positive news stories about Hayes appeared in newspapers nationwide. It also shared all the telegrams sent by his opponent’s campaign staff with Hayes’s staff. Perhaps the most effective way to wield political influence in today’s high-tech world is to donate money to a candidate and then to use technology to make sure he or she wins. The technology guarantees the win, and the donation guarantees allegiance, which Google has certainly tapped in recent years with the Obama administration.


Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/08/how-google-could-rig-the-2016-election-121548#ixzz3vEzrBFid

6 comments:

  1. hmmm, :)

    I'm a little skeptical.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Me too.

      Out here in the boondocks, we rural hicks have the good sense to stick with paper or punch tab ballots which can be formally gone through after the election results are announced by the University of Idaho tabulating service in case someone bitches.

      You can count the results by hand, if necessary, with multiple witnesses from the parties involved, and The League of Women Voters, too.

      Delete
    2. Obviously our hick either did not read the article, or failed to understand it.

      Delete
  2. SOUTHWEST ASIA, December 24, 2015 — U.S. and coalition military forces have continued to attack Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant terrorists in Syria and Iraq, Combined Joint Task Force Operation Inherent Resolve officials reported today.

    Officials reported details of the latest strikes, noting that assessments of results are based on initial reports.

    Strikes in Syria

    Attack, fighter and remotely piloted aircraft conducted six strikes in Syria:

    -- Near Ayn Isa, one strike destroyed an ISIL vehicle and an ISIL fighting position.

    -- Near Mar’a, one strike destroyed an ISIL mortar system and an ISIL fighting position.

    -- Near Manbij, four strikes struck three separate ISIL tactical units and destroyed an ISIL fighting position and an ISIL logistics facility.

    Strikes in Iraq

    Attack, bomber and fighter aircraft and rocket artillery conducted 18 strikes in Iraq, coordinated with and in support of Iraq’s government:

    -- Near Albu Hayat, two strikes struck an ISIL tactical unit and destroyed an ISIL vehicle, an ISIL heavy machine gun, and 24 ISIL rockets.

    -- Near Kisik, one strike struck an ISIL tactical unit and destroyed an ISIL fighting position.

    -- Near Mosul, nine strikes struck seven separate ISIL tactical units and destroyed 24 ISIL fighting positions, two ISIL vehicles, two ISIL heavy machine guns, an ISIL excavator and an ISIL assembly area.

    - Near Ramadi, five strikes struck two separate ISIL tactical units and destroyed an ISIL fighting position, five ISIL command and control nodes, an ISIL tactical vehicle, an ISIL bed-down location, an ISIL artillery site, cratered five ISIL-used roads and denied ISIL access to terrain.

    -- Near Sultan Abdallah, one strike suppressed an ISIL mortar position.

    Task force officials define a strike as one or more kinetic events that occur in roughly the same geographic location to produce a single, sometimes cumulative, effect. Therefore, officials explained, a single aircraft delivering a single weapon against a lone ISIL vehicle is one strike, but so is multiple aircraft delivering dozens of weapons against buildings, vehicles and weapon systems in a compound, for example, having the cumulative effect of making those targets harder or impossible for ISIL to use. Accordingly, officials said, they do not report the number or type of aircraft employed in a strike, the number of munitions dropped in each strike, or the number of individual munition impact points against a target.

    ReplyDelete
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  4. 2020.05.15酒店小姐的基本介紹跟工作內容新冠肺炎疫情逐漸緩和,我在酒店上班的日子八大行業停業超過1個月,酒店舞廳都盼能盡快酒店小姐一定有S?復業,台北市議員林瑞圖15日召開記者會 八大行業是哪八種行業呢?替特殊娛樂工會發聲,盼北市府能讓八大行業恢復營業,北市特殊職場須知 【酒店PT 】娛樂工會副理事長胡繼堯表示,如因疫情關係要實名制,也不是問題,重點是停業一天,對從業人員而言就是酒店打工「零」收入。日前因確診個案379從事八大行業,為避免疫情擴大,中央宣布酒店舞廳一律停業,不過近期疫情和緩,八大業者盼中央能盡快恢復營業,林瑞圖指出,八大行業停業連帶影響許多行業,像是美甲、美髮或計程車業等,而這些人也要維持家計,停業一個月等於收入就停擺,也沒有任何紓困補助。林還說,北市府原本宣布預計5月25日會讓八大復業,中央也沒有意見,但大家長是柯文哲,如市長不答應,也不能開放。胡繼堯說,來到現場的業者都是合法繳稅的酒店,其實很多酒店還是關起門來營業,這也是防疫破口,倒不如採實名制開放營業,工會也會介入輔導執行防疫工作。針對25日如北市府仍不願開放酒店復業,胡表示,一切會配合政府的政策,議員也會持續跟市長協調。在八大行業上班年約30歲的Angel指出,會從事八大行業一定是家裡有困難,不然誰想做八大,但現在停業連房租都繳不出來;在酒店擔任領班的JOJO也說,原本每月都有規畫收入花費,停業後就等於完全沒收入,找家庭代工來做也找不到。

    ReplyDelete