The 2022 midterm elections that gave the Democrats a two-vote majority in the U.S. Senate had quite a bit of help from Google, and, to a lesser extent, from a couple of other major tech companies.
Tristan Harris, a former "Design ethicist" at Google, says that he was a member of a team at the company, whose job it was to influence "a billion people's attention and thoughts every day." Jaron Lanier, a computer scientist and one of the early investors in Google and Facebook, claims that Big Tech content has "Morphed into continuous behavior modification on a mass basis." Another early investor in these companies, the prominent author and venture capitalist Roger McNamee, has said that he now regrets having financed them, and asserts that they constitute "a menace to public health and to democracy."
Such concerns are valid and the Senate numbers correct: we have been using rigorous, scientific methods to study Google and other tech companies for more than 10 years.
We have also developed and deployed monitoring systems that track, record, and analyze the personalized content that Google and other tech companies send to voters and children 24 hours a day - in other words, we are monitoring their systems and doing to them what they do to us.
Our monitoring systems confirm that these companies are actually using these techniques, as confirmed by company whistleblowers, as well as by leaks of documents, emails, videos, and other materials from Google, Facebook, and Twitter.
As a result, Google immediately shut down its election manipulations in the two upcoming Senate runoff elections in Georgia.
In other words, monitoring, combined with political pressure from our leaders and our public, can and will force Google and other tech companies to stay clear of our elections and our children.
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19821/tech-companies-manipulating-elections
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