Are you merely a tool that Google manipulates?

Well, we all have our suspicions, but an article in Green MedInfo last June suggests that our suspicions are totally justified.

‘Following closely on the heels of the June 24th release of Project Veritas’ investigation into Google’s manipulation of search results and auto-suggestions to fit a specific sociopolitical and economic agenda, or its central “Source of Truth” database,’ they say, ‘we tested their hypothesis using two of Google’s own products: Google Search and Google Trends, the latter of which simply tracks the volume of specific keyword searches around the world.’

Green Medinfo looked at the search terms that Google suggests when you entered, for example, ‘supplements are’ and found that they all had negative connotations  (supplements are: bad – dangerous – not regulated – useless – scams etc). But if you look at Google Trends, which only tracks the volume of keyword searches, you find that there are far more searches for positive terms such as ‘supplements are good’, ‘supplements are helpful’ etc than there are for supplements being harmful or bad.

‘Once again we find Google inverting the truth, and auto-suggesting keyword phrases that aren’t ever searched for. There is an entire Wikipedia page on the so-called “Search engine manipulation effect,” which discusses search engine-related manipulation in greater depth. There is a researcher by the name of Robert Epstein who has exposed Google’s ability to manipulate millions of voters on the topic of elections alone. His seminal paper, published in PNAS and titled, “The search engine manipulation effect (SEME) and its possible impact on the outcomes of elections,” and co-authored by Ronald E. Robertson, reveals how biased search rankings can shift the voting preferences of undecided voters by 20% or more. Epstein has said in interview that the effect can be as large as 80% within undecided voters within certain political subgroups.’ 

GreenMedInfo suggests that much of this bias is driven by Google’s very close and super lucrative partnerships with pharmaceutical companies such as GlaxoSmithKline (with whom they signed a $715 million contract in 2016) – and vaccine companies.

A fascinating article – read more here.

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