The biggest loophole for corporations to skew election results goes unnoticed again
I know this is a tech blog, but today is Election Day and there’s no better time to write a little rant about elections and how they are affected by technology. Let’s go over a few points you need to know before I futilely indulge myself thinking anyone out there really cares what I think.
Disclaimer: I’m a big “L” Libertarian, I think both Democrats and Republicans are monstrously corrupt so if you can’t trust most of your politicians, then how can you ever trust your government run by them and want them to run more of our lives?! The safest thing we can all do is limit it so you limit their perverse, corrupt influences in our lives. Get it? That’s why the Constitution is designed to limit government. You limit government, you limit wasted, corruption and its potential abuse. Both Democrat & Republican voters complain about how nastily corrupt politicians are, but they continue to vote to embrace more of it apparently so they can complain about it more the next cycle. Until they die. Such futility, such insanity, such ignorance.
You should trust electronic voting like you trust most politicians
First, I don’t trust electronic voting. How can your vote, which is cast and exists only in bits and bytes on a computer and not actually physically exist, ever be constitutionally acceptable and trusted? If anyone believes these machines can’t be rigged, altered through wifi back doors or other virtually undetectable means, they are extremely naive. The fact is, no electronic voting machine is impermeable, if it was, it would have to be sealed to the point we would never be able to access it. Unless every vote can be physically back referenced, exclusive electronic voting systems are a really bad idea and I contend already have affected many elections since they were introduced.
A smoking gun if there ever was one: Search engine results regarding politicians before elections
But that’s not what I’m going to go on a diatribe today about. No, I would like to share a few strange “coincidences” in the past 10 years I’ve discovered about search engine results regarding politicians running for office so you can make your own informed decision.
2004 was an uneventful election cycle, even though I remember clicking a few stories featuring George Bush that took me to a video of Al Gore and the success of “An Inconvenient Truth”. I know John Kerry was running, but to show Al Gore? Come on!
However, 2008 was when I started noticing patterns, usually almost favoring Democrats. I thought, imagine if billions of search results were being skewed how are these misdirected searches not being counted as political campaign contributions or regulated through campaign finance laws? Do all the search engines have carte blanche to alter political searches to skew results to benefit their own agendas?
It seems so, and no one seems to have noticed, except Michael Savage, a conservative radio talk show host, who reminded me recently of this phenomenon and made me wonder really how pervasive is this corporate tampering with elections in our country?
Michael Savage politically targeted through search engine censorship
Michael Savage mentioned that the book cover image of his new book was flagged by Yahoo as “objectionable material”. Of course, this would limit through browser and user account settings people from ever seeing his book cover image, so if it reaches 150,000 less people searching for it, Yahoo just altered 150,000 peoples’ search results and perhaps nudged the masses under the radar towards their own political views.
I have my own Yahoo story, it used to be my home page until I started noticing it wasn’t delivering the news, it was delivering their version of the news, which usually leaned hard left. Images of a black and white photo of John McCain with the caption “Footage released of McCain leaving Vietnam POW camp” lead me to click, instead taking me to an Al Gore interview on PBS about global warming. I tried it again, same result. Mistake? I think not.
According to Yahoo, Sarah Palin was an orangutang?!
That’s right, when Sarah Palin was announced as McCain’s running mate in 2008, the first time I clicked on a picture and bio I was taken to a story featuring a new arrival of an orangutang to some zoo I no longer can remember. What bothered me most about this, and a few other “mistaken” search results before the election was my time Yahoo wasted playing games. They weren’t being very subtle telling me what they thought, not just about Sarah Palin, but about their search customers. Sure, they could release a statement saying it wasn’t intentional, whatever, I have not used Yahoo as a search engine since.
So, are you a search engine automaton?
The search engine developers and corporate leaders must think they’re being clever, pushing their political agendas through skewed search results, but one day, this unethical practice will catch up to them and their social media cohorts like Facebook, which I have noticed similar activity there as well.
We the people aren’t as malleable as they think, though you as an American may sometimes be concerned about the “Millennial Generation”, being so wired to the web seemingly every waking moment, it’s hard to think that compounded over time that these billions, perhaps trillions of skewed search results haven’t played a major role in influencing election outcomes already. I bet they have.
The “Ninety-Nine Percenters” should be up in arms that such powerful corporations like Yahoo, Microsoft and Google are trying to influence them by using them to push their agendas through staged search results that may push down certain facts and content in favor of what they want to be seen and read. Still, even though this newest generation seems so ready to embrace big nanny government and have all forgotten that America dedicated a lot of time, resources and lives as a country fighting the tyrannical ideology of Communism and its gateway drug Socialism, some seem to embrace it more readily as if trying to rekindle some golden era of a romanticized, compassionate utopia somewhere lurking inside these evil systems designed to exploit the masses and empower a political elite to rule over them, tell them what to do. Is it still en vogue for young adults to still long to be more like the failed, struggling states of Europe instead of America where locally neighbors helped neighbors to hell with government hand-outs? — Stay out of our bedrooms and wallets, as we Libertarians believe?! Where is that independent, don’t-tell-me-what-to-do streak in this young generation? Are they so wired into the 1984 mainframe being told what to do they lost their will to be their own persons?
Not all hope is lost on this generation.
Talk about an empowered generation, with so much knowledge at their finger tips, so many people can learn so much more faster because of the Internet, so maybe they’ll learn to think for themselves more?! Anything you want to know, look it up. This underscores the influence of search engines in a majority of Americans’ lives. We all use the search engines everyday and it sickens me to think a handful of people are altering so many peoples’ access to information. Search engines are the Interstate highway system, but you have to read this pamphlet and these road signs to pass…
I do see pockets of individual empowered movements of American ideals within this generation, and that gives me some hope. Look, I know I’m a John Stossel one-sided Libertarian, you’ll never change me, but we all have the freedom of choice. I’m mostly conservative but I don’t think government should have a say in our personal lives at all, mostly because you can’t trust politicians. Ever.
I hope others feel the same way about what the search engines are obviously doing and feel a little insulted as if we’re all too little-minded to see through their scheme, which I’m sure they would deny and just say that’s how their highly complicated algorithm ranks things and blame it on the math or our own limited ability to understand their incredibly complex business of listing a bunch of words like a catalog.
Oh, get over yourselves, search engine deities. They should just come out and say it at the top of their page:
“Would you like your search results to skew towards Socialist/Liberal, Conservative, Libertarian or Attempt To Be Neutral?”
Funny, if the search engines actually did this, they probably would all be better off being open about it. That way, more people would just find the results they were actually looking for, incrementally giving them more perceived credibility, which is one of the foundations of a successful search engine. People need to trust the search engine and regard the results favorably. Do you?
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