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by internet_toucan 828 days ago
What do you mean by this, do you mean actively and purposefully controlling elections? Do you have any sources on this?
1 comments

Sure. Here is a deposition that goes fairly in-depth:

https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Epstein%20Tes...

Some of this is plainly ridiculous, e.g. the last sentence of the following:

>On Election Day in 2018, the “Go Vote” reminder Google displayed on its home page gave one political party between 800,000 and 4.6 million more votes than it gave the other party. Those numbers might seem impossible, but I published my analysis in January 2019 (https://is.gd/WCdslm) (Epstein, 2019a), and it is quite conservative. Google’s data analysts presumably performed the same calculations I did before the company decided to post its prompt. In other words, Google’s “Go Vote” prompt was not a public service; it was a vote manipulation.

Seems like just some gentle nudging sure. But do that at scale and it's certainly more effective than campaigning for a politician. If they did that in the open, then sure. But they don't.
There's no way for any person or organisation to address the entire voting population at once. So according to this guy, any time anyone encourages people to vote via any medium, they're engaging in election manipulation. This is exactly the sort of duff reasoning that finds non-existent conspiracies in every corner.
>This is exactly the sort of duff reasoning that finds non-existent conspiracies in every corner.

Have you been living under a rock? The tech companies taking sides in politics is not a conspiracy theory.

Reminding people that there’s an election is not taking sides. It’s certainly not an instance of “vote manipulation”. I’m not commenting on the broader issue, just this specific claim, which is bonkers.
>Some of this is plainly ridiculous

Or, is it "plainly ridiculous" to think that Google started on their version of political correctness when they built Gemini, but not before?

The Twitter Files revealed how much the FBI and CIA have their hands in social media. The biggest data source on the planet was untouched?