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>>The 2020 presidential election monitoring project successfully recruited a diverse group of 732 registered voters in three battleground states: Arizona, Flori

>>The 2020 presidential election monitoring project successfully recruited a diverse group of 732 registered voters in three battleground states: Arizona, Florida, and North Carolina. It preserved more than 500,000 ephemeral experiences on Google, Bing, Yahoo, YouTube, and Facebook. These are the fleeting experiences that Big Tech companies use to influence votes and opinions worldwide and that are normally lost forever. >>A preliminary analysis of the data shows that Google search results (but NOT search results on Bing or Yahoo) had a significant liberal bias – enough to have shifted at least 6 million votes in the months leading up to the election. You need to know the methodology being used to understand the results, as they tracked ephemeral experiences using surveillance software with volunteers. This guy needs a website team in the biggest way. It's hard to find the information and it's scattershot. It's very frustrating because the work he's doing is solid. Don't let the shitty web presence deter you. The Rogan podcast was awkward af but he does provide a lot of substantive content if you're open to listening. https://www.aibrt.org/index.php/internet-studies https://www.aibrt.org/index.php/internet-studies is probably the most coherent site, but there's no salient tldr breakdown, to learn more you'll need to watch the videos. https://youtu.be/-7qT_38iRSc https://youtu.be/-7qT_38iRSc is the most comprehensive video, but I'll need to spend more time later to gather better links.

jjulius 5y ago
Preface: I'm pretty big on the "fuck Google/Big Tech" train. >Google's been caught red handed deliberately manipulating political content. >https://mygoogleresearch.com/ https://mygoogleresearch.com/ There's no research on that page. Many of the linked articles that this individual has written also are vague on actual details/proof and only contain vague "this could happen!" comments. Beyond that, many of them also end with a plea for more fundraising. >This guy needs a website team in the biggest way. It's hard to find the information and it's scattershot. It's very frustrating because the work he's doing is solid. Don't let the shitty web presence deter you. All he needs to do is spend a little more time uploading data and evidence, and less time shoving as many "DONATE" buttons onto his page as he can. None of this looks like solid work, even his television appearances; it looks like someone who goes around throwing out lots and lots of loose speculation while asking to be paid to do so.
lelandfe 5y ago
OK, his SEME bias analysis is based on recruiting people through a "passive monitoring system," which recorded SERP rankings over time (what Epstein deems "ephemeral experiences"). Participants' SERP rankings, and raw HTML of each of the top X links, were stored on Epstein's servers. He then had "online workers" (likely mturk?) rate each archived page as pro-Trump or Clinton.[0] He submitted a paper on this in June 2021 to the AABSS but they have yet to publish it. He also has 5 other, earlier SEME papers submitted for publication.[1] I appreciate you going the distance on providing these links but I'm loath to trust this data until it's been peer-reviewed. His AIBRT presentation[2] has some seemingly spurious logic. Here's one slide: https://i.imgur.com/t4rGv3e.png https://i.imgur.com/t4rGv3e.png The graph depicts 300k undecided voters resolving to a party over time. Here's Epstein talking about it: > ...by the time we hit election day, we have an enormous gap - more than 100,000 people - between the conservatives and liberals. And we've created that gap with our biased search results. Assigning that movement to a single cause seems unlikely to me. His presentation does include a relevant WSJ article titled "Google Workers Discussed Tweaking Search Function to Counter Travel Ban."[3] That's not "red-handed," since they didn't do it, but it's very relevant. HN at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18036353 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18036353 [0] https://hackernoon.com/taming-big-tech-5fef0df0f00d https://hackernoon.com/taming-big-tech-5fef0df0f00d [1] https://drrobertepstein.com/pdf/vita.pdf https://drrobertepstein.com/pdf/vita.pdf [2] Video: https://www.aibrt.org/downloads/EPSTEIN_et_al_2021-Large-Scale_Monitoring_of_Big_Tech_Political_Manipulations-FINAL_w_AUDIO.mp4 https://www.aibrt.org/downloads/EPSTEIN_et_al_2021-Large-Sca... [3] https://archive.is/tM18I https://archive.is/tM18I

jjulius 5y ago

Preface: I'm pretty big on the "fuck Google/Big Tech" train. >Google's been caught red handed deliberately manipulating political content. >https://mygoogleresearch.com/ https://mygoogleresearch.com/ There's no research on that page. Many of the linked articles that this individual has written also are vague on actual details/proof and only contain vague "this could happen!" comments. Beyond that, many of them also end with a plea for more fundraising. >This guy needs a website team in the biggest way. It's hard to find the information and it's scattershot. It's very frustrating because the work he's doing is solid. Don't let the shitty web presence deter you. All he needs to do is spend a little more time uploading data and evidence, and less time shoving as many "DONATE" buttons onto his page as he can. None of this looks like solid work, even his television appearances; it looks like someone who goes around throwing out lots and lots of loose speculation while asking to be paid to do so.

lelandfe 5y ago

OK, his SEME bias analysis is based on recruiting people through a "passive monitoring system," which recorded SERP rankings over time (what Epstein deems "ephemeral experiences"). Participants' SERP rankings, and raw HTML of each of the top X links, were stored on Epstein's servers. He then had "online workers" (likely mturk?) rate each archived page as pro-Trump or Clinton.[0] He submitted a paper on this in June 2021 to the AABSS but they have yet to publish it. He also has 5 other, earlier SEME papers submitted for publication.[1] I appreciate you going the distance on providing these links but I'm loath to trust this data until it's been peer-reviewed. His AIBRT presentation[2] has some seemingly spurious logic. Here's one slide: https://i.imgur.com/t4rGv3e.png https://i.imgur.com/t4rGv3e.png The graph depicts 300k undecided voters resolving to a party over time. Here's Epstein talking about it: > ...by the time we hit election day, we have an enormous gap - more than 100,000 people - between the conservatives and liberals. And we've created that gap with our biased search results. Assigning that movement to a single cause seems unlikely to me. His presentation does include a relevant WSJ article titled "Google Workers Discussed Tweaking Search Function to Counter Travel Ban."[3] That's not "red-handed," since they didn't do it, but it's very relevant. HN at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18036353 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18036353 [0] https://hackernoon.com/taming-big-tech-5fef0df0f00d https://hackernoon.com/taming-big-tech-5fef0df0f00d [1] https://drrobertepstein.com/pdf/vita.pdf https://drrobertepstein.com/pdf/vita.pdf [2] Video: https://www.aibrt.org/downloads/EPSTEIN_et_al_2021-Large-Scale_Monitoring_of_Big_Tech_Political_Manipulations-FINAL_w_AUDIO.mp4 https://www.aibrt.org/downloads/EPSTEIN_et_al_2021-Large-Sca... [3] https://archive.is/tM18I https://archive.is/tM18I