09/13/2018
Tucker Carlson keeps uncovering more facts about the enormous power of Big Tech that has been dedicated to promoting leftist causes and candidates through its ability to influence.
Facebook and Google manipulate what users see in order to affect their opinions. Dr. Robert Epstein has been researching the nefarious activities of the tech titans and appeared with Tucker several times to explain the risk to representative government. The quotes below come from a longer piece, Big Tech Threatens to Secretly Undermine America’s Elections.
CARLSON: So what would happen — I know that you’ve gamed this out to some large extent — how would a company potentially like Facebook or Google manipulate public opinion to achieve a desired result in an election?
EPSTEIN: Well I think they’re doing this all the time actually, because we’re well aware of the fact that they suppress material, sometimes they announce it, sometimes they don’t. We are aware of the fact that Google puts some items higher in search results than other items; well, if search results favor one candidate that shifts votes. I think we’re well aware of the fact that news feeds on Facebook sometimes seem to favor one political point of view over another, and that shifts votes. So I have an article coming out very soon about ten different ways that these big tech companies can shift millions of votes in November, in fact I calculate this November they’ll be able to shift upwards of 12 million votes just in the midterm elections.
On Monday’s program, Tucker cited a specific example of Google working to elect Hilary Clinton.
TUCKER CARLSON: For two years, the alleged threat that Russia poses to our elections has been official Washington’s obsession. The usual business of government has come to a halt as Democrats and their allies in the press fret that Russian agents may be interfering with our democracy. The root of these fears: a handful of Russian ads on Facebook that almost no one saw, and a small number of efforts to hack Democratic Party email accounts.
Now, let’s assume that all these deeply worried people are sincere — that they really care about the integrity of our democracy. Then why has almost nobody said anything about the tech monopolies that dominate our exchange of information in this country? If a few dozen Facebook ads are enough to subvert an election, shouldn’t we be worried about Facebook itself, which controls literally billions of ads?
A couple of times on this show, social scientist Robert Epstein has pointed out that Google alone could determine the outcome of almost any American election, just by altering its search suggestions — we’d never know what happened.
“Oh,” say tech defenders, “don’t worry. These are businesses. They exist to make money, not to push political agendas.”
It turns out that’s not true, and we can prove it. An email obtained exclusively by this show reveals that a senior Google employee deployed the company’s resources in 2016 to increase voter turnout in ways she believed would help Clinton win the election.
The email we obtained came from a woman named Eliana Murillo, the former head of Google’s multicultural marketing department. She sent it on November 9, 2016; that was one day after the presidential election. Her email was subsequently forwarded by two Google vice presidents to more staff members in the company.
In her email, Murillo touts Google’s multi-faceted efforts to boost Hispanic voter turnout in the election. She notes that Latinos voted in record-breaking numbers, especially in states like Florida, Nevada and Arizona, the last of which she describes as quote, “a key state for us.” She bragged that the company used its power to ensure that millions of people saw certain hashtags and social media impressions, with the goal of influencing their behavior during the election.
Elsewhere in the email, Murillo says the company quote, “[Google] supported partners like Voto Latino to pay for rides to the polls in key states.” She describes this assistance as quote “a silent donation.” Murillo then says that Google helped Voto Latino create ad campaigns to promote its rides.
Now officially, Voto Latino is a non-partisan entity, but that’s a sham. Voto Latino is vocally partisan. Recently, the group declared that Hispanics — all Hispanics — are in President Trump’s quote “crosshairs,” and said they plan to respond by registering another million additional Hispanic voters in the next presidential cycle. Voto Latino is a group with clear political goals, goals that Google supported in 2016. We asked both Google and Voto Latino for clarification — what exactly did Murillo mean by a “silent donation?” This is potentially significant legal question; neither company responded to us.
At the end of her email, Murillo makes it clear that Google was working to get Hillary Clinton elected. This wasn’t a get out the vote effort — whatever they say — it was not aimed at all potential voters. It wasn’t even aimed at a balanced cross-section of subgroups. Google didn’t try to get out the vote among, say, Christian Arabs in Michigan, or Persian Jews in Los Angeles — they sometimes vote Republican.
It was aimed only at one group, a group that Google cynically assumed would vote exclusively for the Democratic Party. Furthermore, this mobilization effort was targeted not at the entire country but swing states vital to the Hillary campaign. This wasn’t an exercise in civics: this was political consulting. It was, in effect, an in-kind contribution to the Hillary Clinton for President campaign.
In the end, Google was disappointed. As Murillo herself conceded quote, “Ultimately, after all was said and done, the Latino community did come out to vote, and completely surprised us. We never anticipated that 29 percent of Latinos would vote for Trump. No one did. If you see a Latino Googler in the office, please give them a smile. They are probably hurting right now. You can rest assured that the Latinos of these blue states need your thoughts and prayers for them and their families. I had planned a vacation and thought I would be taking the time to celebrate. Now it will be time to reflect on how to continue to support my community through these difficult times.”
Nobody at the DNC was more upset by the results than Murillo. Google tried to get Hillary elected. They failed — this time. We reached out to Google. The company didn’t deny the email was real, or that it showed a clear political preference. Their only defense was that the activities it described were either non-partisan, or weren’t taken officially by the company. But of course, they were both. Plenty of people in Google knew what was going on, and we’ve seen no evidence that anyone at Google disapproved of it or tried to rein it in.
Two years later, Google is more powerful than it’s ever been, and the left has increasingly become radical in what it is willing to do to regain political power. What could Google be doing this election cycle to support its preferred candidates? What could they do in 2020? It’s a question almost nobody in Washington seems interested in even asking. They ought to be interested.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.