The Market Ticker - So You Want Google and Facebook To Determine Elections?

How do you fix this?

Search rankings have this powerful effect on votes for the same reason that they have one on consumer behaviour: the higher the ranking, the more people believe and trust the content, mistakenly assuming that some impartial and omniscient genie has carefully evaluated each Web page and put the best ones first. (Not so.)

Epstein’s team then tried the same technique on 2,000 actual voters in India’s recent presidential election.

“That’s right, we deliberately manipulated the voting preferences of more than 2,000 real voters in the largest democratic election in the history of the world,” he writes, “easily pushing the preferences of undecided voters by more than 12% in any direction we chose – double that amount…….

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