What if a single tech giant had the power to control an election with a tweak of its search engine?

nationalpost.com
Sept. 20, 2015
By Michael Den Tandt

The first of two parts.

If 2011 marked this country’s first wholehearted plunge into online politicking, Election 2015 could be the one in which shaking hands and kissing babies get overtaken by Tweeting and posting. It’s a shift with big implications - though bizarrely, it seems to be taken as a given, or assumed to be wholly good, if it garners much notice.

A closer look yields a more complex portrait. The addled partisanship of Twitter and the breathtaking, targeted reach of Facebook are one thing. What if a single tech giant had the power to control an election with a tweak of its search engine, should it so desire? According to one peer-reviewed study published this summer by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, among the world’s most cited scientific journals, this may be the case already.

“As long as there’s just one search engine, then competition is irrelevant,” said psychologist Robert Epstein, who co-authored the study on what he calls the search engine manipulation effect. “If that search engine company, for whatever reason, ends up favouring one candidate, there’s no possible correction for that and that influence, it turns out, is virtually invisible.”

The search engine Epstein refers to is, of course, Google. The company vigorously disputes his conclusions. Leslie Church, Google Canada’s head of communications, passed along this response from Amit Singhal, the parent company’s senior vice-president of search: “There is absolutely no truth to Mr. Epstein’s hypothesis that Google could work secretly to influence election outcomes. Google has never re-ranked search results on any topic (including elections) to manipulate user sentiment. “

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Politicians who aren’t adept at using social media to mobilize support, or who keep clear of it for fear of saying the wrong thing or becoming a target of trolls, quickly find that non-participation is not an option. Avoiding the Web is tantamount to staying away from the town square a century ago; and Google, the great leveller, connects us to it all.

“For Canada’s 42nd federal election, it’s no longer sufficient to broadcast to televisions in the living rooms of the nation,” wrote Church, who was communications director for then-Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff, in a piece for the CBC in May. It was a scene-setter to unveil a new, more active role for Google in the current federal campaign, including, for example, co-sponsorship of last Thursday’s debate on the economy, and regular monitoring of and reporting on Canadians’ political search habits.

Presumably this data set is drawn from Google Canada searches alone; it holds just under 70 per cent of this country’s search-engine market, alongside small fry such as Bing (10 per cent) and Yahoo Canada (six per cent). In the United States, its market share is also 70 per cent or higher; in Europe, upward of 90 per cent; in India, 95 per cent or more. Such unchallenged dominance gives the company unprecedented insight into Canadians’ political habits online.

But here’s what’s intriguing about Google’s stepping out politically, as it apparently intends to do in the U.S presidential campaign next year. Its 2016 Election Tracker makes it a player, with the potential to wield influence, even as it faces a Competition Bureau investigation in Canada, anti-trust action in Europe and India, and continuing questions about its business practices and active lobbying links to the Obama White House in the United States.

An official with the Competition Bureau confirmed in late August an investigation into “alleged anti-competitive conduct” by Google Canada, launched in December of 2013, is continuing. Queried about the investigation, Church referred all questions to the bureau.

In the United States, a lengthy Federal Trade Commission investigation ended in 2013, after the company agreed to make voluntary changes to its business practices.

But the Wall Street Journal later unearthed, in the course of its research, an undisclosed 160-page FTC staff report, half of which was leaked accidentally, that found Google had abused its de facto monopoly to favour its own ancillary products. Not only did it manipulate searches to drive online traffic to its digital properties, but it blocked access to competitors’ products.

“Vertical websites, such as comparison shopping and local websites, are heavily dependent on Google’s web search results to reach users,” the FTC staff report found. “Thus, Google is in the unique position of being able to make or break any web-based business.”

The Journal concurrently reported Google, the second-largest corporate donor to Barack Obama’s re-election effort, had extensive ties to the White House during the time the FTC file was active.  During the Obama presidency, Google officials visited the White House 230 times, or once a week on average, according to visitor logs. In April, Stephanie Hannon, until then Google’s director of product management, joined Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign as chief technology officer.

Further, there’s new evidence to suggest Google continues to distort web searches in the U.S. to serve its commercial interests.

In late June Tim Wu, a Columbia Law School professor, former FTC adviser and academic star who coined the term “net neutrality,” published results of a study with another Harvard scholar and a team from Yelp, a Google competitor. They concluded “by leveraging dominance in search to promote its Internet content, Google is reducing social welfare - leaving consumers with lower-quality results and worse matches.”

Asked about the Wu study, Google Canada responded: “This isn’t new - Yelp’s been making these arguments to regulators, and demanding higher placement in search results, for the past five years. This latest study is based on a flawed methodology that focuses on results for just a handful of cherry-picked queries. At Google we focus on trying to provide the best results for users.”

Further complicating matters is that Google, of course, is no longer merely a web giant. It has deployed its billions in profits to delve into fields as diverse as longevity, artificial intelligence, driverless cars, space exploration and advanced robotics.

“On the one hand, it’s an ambitious agenda,” Ben Edelman, a professor at Harvard Business School, expert on anti-trust law and long-standing critic of Google’s business practices, said in an interview.

“On the other hand, it would be alarming if Google was able to use their monopoly profits from search advertising in order to own the next generation of technological progress. A generation ago AT&T, the monopoly phone company for the United States, was banned from entering the computer market, because they would dominate computers and no one (else) would get a chance...that’s not the way modern antitrust regulators like to oversee companies’ activities. But it does have a certain resonance.”

Few outside Europe and India are yet, that I am aware of, pressing for aggressive anti-trust action, as occurred with Microsoft in the late 1990s, let alone demanding Google’s monopoly on searches be broken up. The somewhat perplexing question: why not?

Back to Canada: between June 2013 and this past summer, records kept by the federal lobbyist registry show Google Canada employees had 50 meetings with Canadian government officials, from Minister of International Trade Ed Fast on July 20 and Natural Resources Minister Greg Rickford on May 15 to a series of backbench MPs, mainly from the Conservative and New Democratic parties. The subjects at issue, listed by the registry, include: Bill C-13, related to online crime; Bill C-475, An Act to Amend the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act; the Copyright Act; the Income Tax Act, with respect to a “digital renovation tax credit” for small and medium-sized businesses; and the Anti-terrorism Act, Bill C-51.

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Is there anything necessarily untoward about Google seeking to advance its commercial interests? No.

“We have a wide variety of interests in Canada,” said Church. “In general, these meetings focus on Canada’s digital agenda, promoting the growth of Canadian businesses online, how to foster innovation and investment in Canada, and how proposed legislation and regulation may affect Canadians’ access to the Internet.”

But it does seem worthy of attention, particularly when a company with this much heft takes on a role in the political discussion. That gets us back to Epstein’s study suggesting Google’s search algorithm may already be influencing the outcome of elections worldwide - which, to repeat, Google denies.

In the course of their research, Epstein and co-author Ronald Robertson found skewing search-engine results to favour a specific candidate can create huge swings in voter preferences, without users being aware they are being manipulated. “I didn’t think we’d find much at all when we looked outside the consumer realm,” Epstein said. “...our numbers were so big, we were expecting we could shift the proportion supporting a candidate maybe two or three per cent. We ended up shifting them between 37 and 63 per cent.”

One does not need to be a conspiracy nut, stocking up on canned meat and bottled water against the inevitable hegemony of Big Data, to wonder at the implications. At the very least it is a fit subject for discussion, one that in Canada, for whatever reason, hasn’t even begun.