[T]ech companies… can flip elections any and all ways they please without anyone knowing.
When you monitor, you can catch them in their shenanigans, and you can get them to back down. We got Google to back down by exposing some of the manipulations that they were engaging in in the presidential election.
You may not have heard the term “ephemeral experiences” before…. These are very brief experiences that we all have online every day. They are things like newsfeeds, search results, search suggestions, sequences of YouTube videos. None of that is recorded anywhere. It affects us, as Google executives know full well.
It just appears, we click, and it disappears. It is stored nowhere, it leaves no paper trail for authorities to trace. It can be used to manipulate, and it is being used to manipulate very deliberately and strategically, especially at Google. I think some of the other companies as well have been catching on, especially Facebook.
[A]s of 2015, you could shift so many votes that way that we calculated that upwards of 25 percent of the national elections in the world – the outcomes of those elections – were being determined by Google’s search engine.
