What Is SEME?
SEME is an abbreviation for “search engine manipulation effect.” In a series of randomized controlled experiments, it has been shown that more than 20 percent of undecided voters can be manipulated into voting one way or the other, by simply manipulating the rankings of search engine results.“Internet search rankings have a significant impact on consumer choices, mainly because users trust and choose higher-ranked results more than lower-ranked results. Given the apparent power of search rankings, we asked whether they could be manipulated to alter the preferences of undecided voters in democratic elections.
“Here we report the results of five relevant double-blind, randomized controlled experiments, using a total of 4,556 undecided voters representing diverse demographic characteristics of the voting populations of the United States and India. The fifth experiment is especially notable in that it was conducted with eligible voters throughout India in the midst of its 2014 Lok Sabha elections just before the final votes were cast.
“The results of these experiments demonstrate that (i) biased search rankings can shift the voting preferences of undecided voters by 20 percent or more, (ii) the shift can be much higher in some demographic groups, and (iii) search ranking bias can be masked so that people show no awareness of the manipulation.
The principle investigator of these studies has gone on to show that the 2016, 2020, and 2022 elections were all manipulated by Google. After Hillary Clinton’s loss in 2016, which shocked Google leadership, internal whistleblowers revealed that Google vowed that it wouldn’t happen again. Which is why Trump “lost” in 2020.
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Robert Epstein: Google is actually surveilling you and your kids and your loved ones on over more than 200 different platforms, most of which people have not heard of. So, quick example, most websites, millions of websites use Google Analytics to track traffic to their website ...If you are using a Google service such as Google Analytics, then they have a right to track you. So, in other words, on all of those websites that use Google Analytics, which Google provides for free to companies around the world, if you visit any of those websites, Google is tracking every single thing you do on those websites. So, there are actually more than 200 different ways in which they’re tracking us. They bought Fitbit a few years ago, so that gives them physiological data 24 hours a day. About seven, eight years ago, they bought the Nest Smart Thermostat company, and the first thing they did after they started making smart thermostats was they put microphones in them.
But the point is they did this without telling anyone. At the time, they also were filing for patents on how to interpret sounds inside the home, so they could tell whether the kids are okay, whether your sex life is okay. They literally got patents on methods for interpreting sound inside homes.
Which is one of the things that now my research is looking at directly, is that indoctrination problem. We are going to put into office people we think should be in office, not just in the U.S. but around the world. We are going to impact the thinking and behavior and emotions of right now, of more than 4 billion people around the world the way we want to, generally speaking, without anyone knowing what we’re doing and generally speaking, without leaving a paper trail.
It’s gone way past experimentation because they have mastered techniques, which I’ve been discovering and naming and identifying and quantifying over the years, but they’ve mastered techniques which they use without any constraint. They use them to impact our kids. They use them to impact our elections. They use them to impact decisions that pretty much everyone makes, especially if you’re using a lot of Google services, which I think you are.
If you’ve been using the internet for 20 years, which probably the people at this table have been, they have the equivalent of more than three million pages of information about you.
But it’s very easy to switch off of Gmails. So, this is a little footnote, I guess, on our larger discussion, but it’s worth bringing up. You can set your Gmail to forward emails that are coming in. What you want to do is set it to forward to your new Proton Mail account. You can sign up for Proton Mail in seconds because they don’t ask you anything about yourself because they don’t survive off of surveillance. They’re based in Switzerland. They’re subject to very strict Swiss privacy laws. They use end-to-end encryption. So, if you’re writing from Proton Mail to Proton Mail, no one can see that message. Not even the people at Proton Mail.
They never erase anything. They do, however, cut people off sometimes from their Gmails. They’ve done that to millions of people. You’ve probably heard of Jordan Peterson as a colleague of mine, psychologist up in Canada. He’s one of millions of people who has been completely cut off from his accounts. When they cut you off from Gmail, they cut you off from all of your accounts. They can do this with or without cause. They have no customer service department.
But it’s not. The U.S. Postal Service, they actually do preserve your privacy unless they get a court order and they also have to deliver the mail. They must deliver the mail. Okay. So, Gmail pretends it’s a free postal service, except they’re not subject to any rules or regulations of any sort, and they don’t have to deliver your mail. If they want to, they can take millions of emails coming, let’s say, from the Republican Party that are going out to constituents and they can send them right into people’s spam boxes. So, no one ever sees those. In fact, the RNC sued Google last year, because in fact, they were doing just that.
They don’t have to deliver mail. They can alter mail, believe it or not. Then of course, there’s the surveillance. They read your emails. The Postal Service doesn’t read everyone’s emails and put all the information into everyone’s profiles, but we’re talking about massive surveillance on the one hand.
Number two, we’re talking about massive censorship. A big article I wrote for US News and World Report a few years ago was on nine of Google’s blacklists. I had never seen them, but I knew as a programmer that they existed. I described them in detail. They deny having blacklists. When I testified before Congress in 2019, right before me, a Google executive was asked under oath, “Sir, does Google have blacklists?” He said, under oath, “No, Senator, we do not.”
A few weeks later, a Google whistleblower walked out of Google. His name is Zach Vorhies who I’ve gotten to know very well over the years. He walks out with 950 pages of documents from Google, three of which are labeled blacklists. I mean, talk about the arrogance of this company. Would you label your blacklist blacklists? Because I wouldn’t. But the point is, of course, they have blacklists. A lot of the entities listed on those lists were conservative organizations or conservative personalities. So, again, they have very, very, very strong corporate culture, and they suppress content that they don’t want people to see.
So, you’ve got the surveillance, number one. Number two, massive censorship. Then number three, which is what I started studying more than 10 years ago, manipulation techniques. They have access to techniques of manipulation, which have never existed before in human history. They’re made possible by the internet. Unfortunately, they’re controlled almost entirely by a couple of tech monopolies.
What’s wrong with that? What’s wrong with that is if let’s say you’re running a political campaign and you put up a billboard, well, I can put up a billboard across the street and counter your billboard. You buy a TV commercial. I can buy another TV commercial. In other words, a lot of what happens in elections or for that matter in life is competitive.
A good part of democracy is that competitiveness. But if Google itself wants to support a party or a candidate using one of these new techniques that we study, there’s nothing you can do. Generally speaking, you can’t even see what they’re doing. Even if you could, you have no way to counteract it. They can implement those techniques free of charge to them, costs them nothing, and they can implement them on a massive scale, not just around this country, but around the world. They do. They do this strategically and deliberately every single day. There is no one stopping them. There are no relevant regulations or laws. They have absolute free hand.
(Personally) Well, I’ve got more than pushback. I mean, I’ve paid a price. I was contacted by a DC journalist a couple of years ago. He was doing a piece about my work, and he said that he was going to try to get comments from Google. Calls me up a couple days later, said he had talked to a woman who he believed was the head of their PR department. He said, “And she screamed at me when I asked her questions about your work.” He said, “I’ve never seen that before. It’s very unprofessional.” He said, “Based on what she was saying, I want to tell you two things. Number one, you’ve got their attention. Number two, if I were you, I would take precautions.”
Now, summer of 2019, I had been working with AGs since 2015, but that particular summer, I gave a private briefing to a bunch of AGs. It was at Stanford University. I scared the heck out of everyone, lots and lots of detail, lots of tough questions. Went out into the lobby when I was done. Little while later, the meeting breaks up. One of these AGs, I know exactly who it was, he walked up to me, he said, “Dr. Epstein, I don’t want to scare you.” He said, “But based on what you’ve told us, I’m predicting that you’re going to be killed in some accident in the next few months.” Now, I wasn’t killed, but my wife was. I’m still struggling with that, but there have been other incidents since then.
Well, she was in a car accident. I talked with a woman who was in the car behind her. It appeared that her brakes had failed as she was getting onto the freeway, but there were some aspects of this that were very suspicious. One was her vehicle, which I had bought for her, a little pickup truck, had never been examined forensically. It disappeared very quickly off of the impound lot, supposedly disappeared somewhere in Mexico. When I looked at her phone, I realized that her Android phone had a complete record of every single place she had been, the route she had taken, the number of minutes that she had spent at every place going back years. Then in fact, Google knew the night before, let’s say, they knew exactly where her vehicle was.
In other words, they could easily have just contacted a security firm who then calls up a contractor. They could easily have tampered with her breaks, but that’s not the only incident. Last year, our managing director, wonderful, very talented woman, married to an extremely handsome guy. I was always jealous of him. They’re walking in Downtown San Diego, 2:00 in the afternoon on a Saturday. A man comes out of the blue, pulls out a knife, slashes her husband’s face from the ear down to his mouth. He’ll never look the same again ever. There was nerve damage as well. But that guy then looks at her straight in the eye and laughs and runs away.
She only stayed with us another two months. She was terrified. We’ve already had a third incident very recently, which I don’t even want to talk about. But the point is I’ve received warnings and there have been events which are very disturbing. There’s a lot at stake here. The fact is I’m a threat not just to Google, but to some other companies. But I’m an actual threat because I’m actually doing something about what they are doing to us. They left me alone pretty much until I testified before Congress. That was it.
So, short answer to your question is, yes, Google has been working with government agencies, not just in the U.S. but around the world since they were founded more than 20 years ago. So, they work very, very closely with governments, not just our government. That’s one of the problems you see with the surveillance that they do. They’re doing surveillance at a massive level that J. Edgar Hoover couldn’t even possibly have imagined. It’s 24 hours a day, and it’s over many, many, many different kinds of platforms that, again, most people haven’t even heard of.
But one of the problems there is you don’t know who they’re sharing the information with and you don’t know how they’re using it. We know they’re using it for manipulation purposes, because the more you know about people, the easier it is to just nudge them in one direction or another. But the fact is, if you look at their terms of service, it says they have a right to share the information they’re collecting with their unnamed business partners and as required by law.
Yes. They also share that information with thousands of outside consultants. So, you don’t know where that information’s going and you don’t know how it’s being used. They’re subject to being hacked like anyone else. So, I mean that information, that massive amounts of information about everything you’ve ever bought, any website you’ve ever looked at, it’s everything about you. It’s everything about your family history, your sexual history, your disease history, even your genetics.
I don’t even have a normal phone, by the way. Your phones are all surveillance devices. I have a secure phone, and it doesn’t do that. So, I have the kind of phone that people in intelligence agencies use. We actually build them for our staff members.
Okay. In fact, this was suggested to me that I should take this animation and I should put myself into the lower left corner of it, talking people through it. It’s just one minute long, but this is the way it goes.
So, what you’re seeing is a very simple graph and it’s showing you on Google’s homepage on Election Day in 2022, November 8th. It’s showing you on Google’s homepage, first of all, with red dots and red lines, it’s showing you the proportion of conservatives who are getting go vote reminders on Google’s homepage, which as you said earlier, is seen 500 million times a day just in the United States. So, we’re starting at 10:00 in the morning, and you’re seeing a red dot come on there. It’s showing you the proportion of conservatives that are getting those reminders. It’s close to 100 percent at beginning of the day. For blue dots and then connected by blue lines, we’re seeing the proportion of liberals who are getting go vote reminders on Google’s homepage.
Oh, there’s not even a reason for us to have elections because they know who’s going to vote, who’s not going to vote, how they’re going to vote. They know all that stuff in advance.
So, it’s 10:00 in the morning. Now the way this works is this animation lasts one minute. Every second is another 15 minutes go by. So, we’re speeding up. What would happen in real time if we had this running on real time and it was online for everyone to see? So here come the two points.
So, it’s 10:00, it’s 10:15, you get two more dots, it’s 10:30. You get two more dots, and the dots are moving. You’re seeing these curves, these lines build up, and you’re seeing that through most of the day nearly 100 percent of conservatives and liberals are getting go vote reminders, which is fine. So, the line keeps moving, and now all of a sudden, it’s 5:00, it’s 5:30. Those two points are still very high near the top of the graph. Then around 6:00 or so, this is Pacific Time.
So, the polls are still open in lots of places. That’s when a lot of people are getting off work. That’s when a lot of people run to the polls. All of a sudden, the blue dots keep staying at the top. So, 100 percent of liberals are getting those go vote reminders. The red dots start going down and down and down, and they go all the way down to zero. The last couple of hours, you stay at zero.
Now, imagine if you’re, let’s say, Trump and you’re running for president in 2024. Imagine if we gave everyone access to that information as we’re collecting it in real time. Imagine if those dots start going down.
Wouldn’t you have your lawyer who’s literally standing there with all the paperwork ready to hand to a judge? Wouldn’t you have your lawyer run to court and say, “Your Honor, we need an emergency injunction. We need to shut down Google. Google is doing something. Google is manipulating right now, millions of votes?”
That’s just one example. The reason I mentioned, because we literally just created that graph, created that animation.
We found tremendous bias on Google search results favoring Hillary Clinton, but not on Bing or Yahoo. So, you always have to have comparisons. Enough to have shifted, if that level of bias had been present nationwide, that would’ve shifted between 2.6 and 10.4 million votes to Hillary Clinton over a period of several months before the election. Whose votes are getting shifted? They’re not shifting die-hard Democrats and Republicans. They’re shifting the undecided voters. Those are the people they go ask-
Those have a tremendous impact on people, and we’ve measured that in experiments. That has a tremendous impact on people who are undecided, but it gets worse because now we’re getting data from children and teens. Those up next suggestions on YouTube, it’s 96 percent for children and teens are coming from liberal news sources. 96 percent.
Because if you just look at their account, you have a completely different experience than what they actually are getting because of the way the feeds and the algorithms push information to you. What are you seeing? I’m glad that they’re giving you permission to monitor the kids because I think that there are very bad things going on with kids and it’s causing social contagions of very harmful behavior. What are you seeing?
That will keep track, make a record of all of this ephemeral content, and then the parents can look back and actually see what the kids were seeing. So, so far, parents really don’t know, but I can tell you without any doubt that our children are being subjected to indoctrinations 24 hours a day, that it is so intense that I think it could legitimately be called brainwashing. A lot of the mysterious things that seem to be happening with the thinking of our kids, all these mysteries, this sudden use of all kinds of gender terms or sexual orientation terms or attitudes towards this or that and these massive changes in thinking among young people that seem to happen almost overnight, those are engineered.
They are engineered, and we are going to be able to show as our system gets large enough, we are going to be able to document that. More importantly, we are going to be able to expose it and I can give you one clear example if and when you’re ready for it, where we show that by exposing what they’re doing, we can get them to stop.
So, by exposing the indoctrination that’s occurring, we’re going to get them to stop. We know how to keep them away from our elections and away from our kids. It’s just a question of scaling up the kind of monitoring systems that we’ve been building, and we’re doing that right now.
