Google’s Search-Ranking Manipulation Is Affecting Elections
By Good / www.goodis.com
AS THE 2018 MIDTERM ELECTIONS APPROACH IN THE U.S., Google’s power to influence undecided voters remains overshadowed by Facebook’s personal data crisis.
Facebook has “taken it on the chin” for its role in the 2016 presidential election, and organizations like the political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica and the Russian troll farm known as the Internet Research Agency have dominated headlines. Yet despite having a troubling history and collecting more personal data through more products than Facebook, Google has somehow managed to evade the public spotlight on this one. That may be changing.
The U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee recently sent Google a letter asking a series of questions about the company’s personal data protections. As one of the researchers who helped discover that search engines can substantially influence users’ voting preferences, I found the last question to be the most intriguing: “Are you aware of any foreign entities seeking to influence or interfere with U.S. elections through your platforms?” If Google’s response to this question exists, it has not been made public.
Search engine influence
SINCE 2013, I’VE BEEN INVOLVED IN THE DESIGN AND EXECUTION OF A LONG SERIES OF EXPERIMENTS that have demonstrated how search engines can influence undecided voters’ candidate choices through nearly undetectable manipulations to search rankings. We labeled this powerful new form of influence the search engine manipulation effect.
The way this effect works is simple: Favoritism for a particular candidate in election-related search rankings leads to people preferring that candidate. For example, a search related to an upcoming election might return results favoring candidate A higher than results favoring candidate B. That’s called partisan ranking bias. Since people tend to click on and trust highly ranked results, more people will then trust and consume the information supporting candidate A. In turn, that consumption increases their preference for candidate A.
The most important aspect of this effect, however, is that most people can’t detect the partisan ranking bias — and it’s virtually impossible to defend yourself from influences you can’t perceive. Fortunately, in three follow-up experiments, involving 3,600 participants, we demonstrated that alerting people to partisan ranking bias can help suppress the effect — though only laws or regulations actually preventing partisan ranking could eliminate the effect entirely.
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