Google at war against minds?

With 5 billion smartphone users worldwide in 2024^[1], almost all of us live with a spy in our pocket. Without our knowledge, over the years these little pocket computers have become ultra-efficient, invasive control devices.

Thanks to a sophisticated marketing strategy that consists of offering numerous functions and applications “free of charge”, manufacturers and access providers are able to geolocate us permanently, record our conversations and exchanges on social networks, and store our searches as well as our purchases, in order to codify our choices and behaviour with precision. Big Tech, and first and foremost Google, thus analyse our political opinions, our sexual orientation as well as our commitments in terms of activism, spirituality or religion.

Meeting our digital twin

Using powerful algorithms, this gigantic concentration of data makes it possible to build a dynamic and extremely precise profile of each user, called a digital twin. These algorithms are not only capable of “predictive programming”, i.e. anticipating our behaviour, but also of steering it, by means of factors inserted by Google into the content served to us, according to criteria to which we have no access.

A totally asymmetrical relationship has thus taken hold between the consumer and GAFAM (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft). While we believe we are moving around a gigantic library of knowledge, free, at no cost and accessible to all, we are tracked and analysed 24/7, the better to influence us according to our profile, in the direction decided by Big Tech. Moreover, our data is a source of considerable profit: it is sold to a panel of companies for targeted marketing with our authorisation, even if, like 91% of users2 - and 97% of young people under 34 - we do not read the legal terms of the contract.

Ten years ago already, analysts were warning us that Google already knew more about us3 than we do ourselves. With the exponential development of AI, imagine the power this company has today over every internet user. In the United States, for example, the detailed analysis of this considerable mass of data (Big Data) using AI allows Google and other Big Tech companies to build a detailed political picture, state by state, county by county, by linking, on the one hand, the party affiliation of officially registered American citizens to their digital profile, and by analysing, on the other hand, their exchanges on social networks. These dynamic cross-references, used as early as 2008 in Obama’s political campaign, contributed to his victory.

From a lucrative coalition to totalitarianism 2.0?

All this data handled by Google is of keen interest to the federal government and even more so to the intelligence agencies. The closeness between the Tech giant and the Obama administration is reflected in the number of visits recorded in the White House visitor log: between 21 January 2009 and 31 October 2015, Google engineers and executives visited the White House 427 times^[2]. In other words, more than once a week, meetings and interviews followed one another between Google employees and Obama administration officials on a very wide range of subjects: national security, digital media strategy, government contracts, antitrust legislation, intellectual property, biotechnology, energy and climate change, telecommunications, foreign policy, health: almost everything was covered.

The demonstration of a convergence of interests is unequivocal. This close partnership forged between Google and the federal government not only turned into lucrative public-private contracts, but also made it possible to develop real-time surveillance of every American and foreign citizen, to the benefit of the tech giant, the federal government and its agencies alike. This surveillance is the basis of a sophisticated censorship system, commissioned by the intelligence agencies and deployed via Big Tech, to manipulate voters in the direction decided by what is nicknamed “the deep state”. This expression refers to an interlocking consortium of unelected senior officials who, within the State Department, the Department of Defense and the intelligence agencies (CIA, NSA, FBI), steer and conduct American policy, whichever party is elected to power. It also includes the CEOs of large corporations as well as the main establishment media and a number of NGOs and think tanks (groups for reflection and policy guidance) tasked with consolidating the influence of this consortium both at home and abroad.

A look back at the 2016 US presidential election

In Europe, people do not always realise how relentlessly and systematically Donald Trump was attacked by power networks via subservient media. The media, the fourth pillar of power, supposed to ensure freedom of information and guarantee its reliability, de facto operate in the service of the consortium to get elected those who will serve its interests. These attacks, aimed at denigrating the man and making him repellent to at least part of the American population, intensified from mid-2015, when Trump’s campaign began.

Indeed, despite being a billionaire and part of a certain elite, Donald Trump is not an insider. Before his 2016 campaign, he had no political experience and his preferences changed^[3] over time. Following in his father’s footsteps, he supported the Democratic Party in New York and counted John-John Kennedy, JFK’s son, among his close friends. In the 1980s, he backed Ronald Reagan’s candidacy. At the end of the 1990s, he drew close for a time to Ross Perot, a businessman like himself, who ran in the 1992 and 1996 presidential elections as an independent. In 2012, he considered running against Obama when the latter was seeking a second term, then gave up the idea.

When, in 2015, he announced his candidacy for president on the Republican ticket, he set off a tidal wave in the political microcosm of Washington D.C. and made the establishment tremble. In fact, this outsider threatened the system in place and risked jamming its well-oiled machinery, while Hillary Clinton was part of the circle and was widely supported by Google, her largest donor, as Barak Obama had been before her. The relentless campaign waged against him in 2016 would reach such intensity that not only did part of the American public hate him – people speak of Trump Derangement Syndrome – I checked this personally with my Democrat friends -, but most Europeans also regard him as a dangerous fascist.

Google, the power of a monopoly

How did we get here? What means were used to manipulate opinion to such an extent, and even to directly influence election results? Google’s interference would indeed peak in the 2020 US presidential election. The question matters because history could well repeat itself in 2024…

Google de facto holds a monopoly on search engines in the West, answering 92% of online searches. Within GAFAM, all of which are American corporations, Google alone represents a market capitalisation of 1,655 billion dollars in 2024. This company has the largest user base: Google has 1.5 billion active Gmail accounts, while Google Chrome has 2.6 billion active users^[4] worldwide. This monopoly position allows it to generate astronomical advertising revenue: 238 billion dollars^[5] in 2023, and explains its privileged relationship with the government and the intelligence services.

Robert Epstein, the researcher who sounded the alarm

This is not Google’s first attempt, as explained by Professor Robert Epstein who, as early as 2015, was publicly warning about Google’s influence^[6] on elections. This psychology researcher is also a geek with a passion for computing. He obtained his PhD at Harvard University in 1981, then led research on various subjects in the analysis of human behaviour, developing online tests and inventing computer models. A prolific author, R. Epstein writes for and contributes to many media outlets. In 2013, he discovered how search engines can manipulate election results, a phenomenon he called SEME (Search Engine Manipulation Effect). He presented at several universities and published on the subject, showing that a dominant company such as Google has the power to determine the outcome of close elections.

From 2015, R. Epstein put together a team to demonstrate how search engines – Google above all – go about influencing and manipulating individuals. He recruited volunteers in every state who agreed to equip their devices with software developed by his team to systematically capture the search results provided by Google (and other engines such as Bing or Yahoo), then analyse them to identify biases.

The psychologist thus discovered not only that the biases exist and are skewed in favour of the Democrats, but that they are specifically targeted according to the user’s profile.

Google’s influence on elections

In democratic countries, presidential election results come down to a few percentage points. It is therefore the undecided, who represent around 20% of voters, who can swing the result of an election. They are identified and tracked as they carry out their online searches, in order to be influenced in the direction sought by Google. In the USA, undecided voters tend to be moderates who lean towards the liberal camp, and Google knows it. The algorithm will therefore select the top 10 results on the first page showing positive articles, interviews and opinions about Democratic candidates – whether for the presidential election or for a seat in the Senate or the House of Representatives. If the queries concern the other party, the search engine brings up negative reviews and degrading images of Republican candidates. This is an ephemeral system of censorship organised by algorithms (once the results of a search have been displayed, they disappear) and whose selection criteria are not public.

The undecided are precisely identified through the users’ digital profiles created and managed by Google’s algorithms. Facebook works in a similar way, highlighting ephemeral posts slanted according to the profile.

These findings, worrying for the functioning of democracy, were published in scientific journals. No university, however, took up or developed this work, as research directors did not dare to stand up to the Tech giant. Paradoxically, it was a whistleblower who would confirm the accuracy of Robert Epstein’s discoveries.

Zach Vorhies: the whistleblower who revealed the blacklists

Whistleblower Zach Vorhies^[7] made headlines in 2020 by publicly denouncing Google’s deceptive manipulation on political topics. This software engineer worked for almost 9 years for the Alphabet holding company in San Francisco, first for Google, then for YouTube. Without being really politically committed, he noted the leftist leanings of most employees and did not like the way conservatives, a tiny minority within the company, were treated. It must be said that the company displays strong values and recruits accordingly. Google proclaims itself liberal, in the service of a utopia that the company strives to impose on all of humanity, now expressed through the principles of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) and woke ideology. For beyond elections, a genuine system of censorship has gradually been put in place by Big Tech in the name of DEI ideology, associated with the Democrats, while conservatives are branded with labels such as fascist, far-right or antisemitic.

This ideology, born in reaction to racism, has drifted towards extreme positions, such as the systematic victimisation of minorities including LGBTQ+ people, or the guilt-tripping of white people. In large corporations such as Alphabet, it takes the form of DEI pacts, going as far as promoting employees not on the basis of their experience and skills, but according to their skin colour or sexual orientation.

Among his colleagues, Zach Vorhies distinguished two categories: apathetic liberals, indifferent to changes in society, and committed Democrats, who systematically take sides against those who are not like them. He was stunned by their reaction after Trump’s victory. In mid-November 2016, the atmosphere at the internal end-of-week meeting was like a funeral. Employees were devastated, some were crying. The recurring question was: “how is it possible that more than half of our fellow citizens could vote for Trump?”. When a Google employee asked what could be done to fight disinformation and the fake news blamed for leading to Trump’s election, Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO, replied with remarks that were both vague and alarming. S. Pichai saw it as an opportunity to make progress in the field of machine learning and artificial intelligence. Until then, the internal control systems had been intended to tackle problems such as harassment and offensive comments. But once rolled out on a wide scale, AI and machine learning could be used to do much more.

The multinational then took a marked turn towards censorship. Its algorithms made invisible or blocked not only conservative sites, media and influencers, but soon also all those who, during the COVID crisis, challenged the validity of public health measures. When Zach Vorhies discovered the “political blacklists”^[8] grouping together sites, YouTube channels and keywords that are built into the search algorithms to ban, make invisible or attach a negative label to certain sources of information, he took a radical decision. In June 2019, he resigned from Google, taking with him more than 950 pages of internal documents - including the famous blacklists - which he handed over to the Department of Justice. Through Project Veritas, he also alerted the public to Google’s vast system of censorship. Recognised as a whistleblower, Z. Vorhies then told his story in a book published in August 2021, Google Leaks^[9]!. In it, he sets out in detail how the company developed a genuine “Ministry of Truth” internally.

Inaction of politicians

Under the United States Code^[10], lying under oath before Congress is perjury, just like lying before a court. And yet, when questioned in 2019 before a congressional committee by Democratic Senator Mazie Hirono about the creation of political blacklists, Google’s vice-president for public policy, Karan Bhatia, replied: “no, Senator, we do not use blacklists to influence our search results”.

For his part, Robert Epstein continues to document the takeover of behaviour, minds and elections by the search engine that has become almost unavoidable for billions of users. In his talks, this liberal repeats that he places democracy, the United States and humanity above any political party. As early as 2016, when he himself supported Hillary Clinton, he was troubled by the results drawn from his software installed with 95 volunteers spread across 24 American states. The analyses he conducted with his team on 13,000 election-related search results showed extreme biases generated by Google. According to his calculations, these biases may have shifted between 2.6 and 10.4 million votes of undecided voters to the Democratic candidate, without anyone noticing!

In June 2019, R. Epstein was called before the US Senate Judiciary Committee to present the results^[11] of his research. His aim was to alert elected officials to the threats Google poses to the proper functioning of democracy. In his testimony, he warned that Google engineers deliberately build ephemeral experiences to change the way internet users think and to steer their choices. He also pointed to the mass surveillance operations carried out by GAFAM, notably Facebook, and confirmed the existence of the blacklists. Finally, he warned the committee that, since the Tech giants all support the same party, the 2020 elections were compromised and that there was a major risk that Facebook and above all Google would use their algorithms to achieve their ends: getting the Democratic candidates elected.

Yet the senators did not react, even though Professor Epstein presented concrete technical solutions for monitoring Google. Let us remember that members of the Democratic Party are financially supported by Big Tech, and some were in an election period. As for the Republicans, they are reluctant to legislate and hinder what they still regard as free competition. No decision was taken and the hearings went no further.

The survival of democracy is at stake

In 2020, with an expanded team and greater funding, Epstein repeated the experiment. 1735 volunteers living in the key states and counties for the presidential election were recruited. 5 million web pages on Google, Yahoo, YouTube, Facebook and Bing were saved. A few days before the election, he decided to make his analysis results public. The results unambiguously confirm biases, irregularities or fraud denounced in particular by election auditors and experts^[12]. Robert Epstein even dares to assert that, according to his projections, without Google’s intervention, the US Presidency, Senate and Congress would have had a Republican majority! The following table, taken from the website created by the Epstein team^[13] sets out side by side the official election results (left-hand column) and a projection of the results without Google’s interference (right-hand column).

Robert Epstein must feel like a voice crying in the wilderness: the mainstream media ignore him, senators hear him and then turn away from his work without legislating, his fellow researchers refuse to take up the torch. Yet, with his team, he tirelessly pursues his work, denouncing an unprecedented takeover of our minds. Indeed, for this experienced psychologist, there is no doubt that what is at stake is nothing less than the freedom to exercise our critical faculties and to think for ourselves. For, thanks to new technologies, these manipulations are of a quite different nature and scale from the means used in earlier totalitarian regimes. Because of their ephemeral nature, these manipulations escape the conscious mind and act subliminally, affecting our choices and our behaviour.

200 platforms practise content control

As R. Epstein sums it up, “you don’t know what you are not being shown”. The vast majority of internet users do not take their searches beyond the first page of results offered by Google. They passively accept the truth according to Google. The order in which online search results are presented is therefore decisive in influencing the user’s behaviour, according to the criteria programmed into the algorithm. Content control and steering are carried out by 200 dedicated platforms, orchestrated as a global surveillance system according to secret protocols. Google Analytics is designed to generate colossal profits while championing an ideology. And similar mechanisms are at work at Facebook.

Reference is often made to President Dwight Eisenhower’s farewell address delivered on 17 January 1961, in which he warned against the military-industrial complex. Robert Epstein points to a second warning^[14] given by Eisenhower: “the danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite”.  Sixty years later, here we are. The techno-scientific elite has taken power and infiltrated governments as well as international institutions. Considerable power has ended up in the hands of billionaires, megalomaniac Tech moguls. Eager for eternal life through AI, they are deploying their techno-religion and now have the means to steer the masses in the direction they themselves have chosen.

Is it already too late?

The solutions proposed by Robert Epstein are pragmatic and relatively easy to implement if the political will exists. Google should be required to make public the search index of its huge database, in other words to make it open source. After all, shouldn’t access to information be a public good? This would make the way results are filtered transparent, without reducing the profits generated by advertising. It would also revive innovation and healthy competition, by encouraging the creation of high-performing search engines that could specialise in niches and areas of interest.

Currently, 70% of the videos internet users watch on YouTube are those recommended by the algorithm. If we do not agree to Google steering our decisions and manipulating our behaviour without our knowledge, let us start by switching off automatic recommendations, install an independent search engine and take back our power!

Elisabeth Dancet

Standfirst and illustration by BAM!

Photo montage: Marcan

[1] How Many People Own Smartphones in the World? (2024‑2029) | Priori Data

[2] TTP - Google’s White House Meetings

[3] Donald Trump: Campaigns and Elections | Miller Center

[4] https://zipdo.co/google‑user‑statistics/

[5] Google: advertising revenue 2023 | Statista

[6] How Google Could Rig the 2016 Election - POLITICO Magazine

[7] Zach Vorhies - Google | Project Veritas

[8] More reports suggest Google lied when it told congress it doesn’t have manual blacklists

[9] Google Leaks: A Whistleblower’s Exposé of Big Tech Censorship: 9781510767362: Heckenlively, Kent, Vorhies, Zach: Books

[10] 18 U.S. Code § 1001 - Statements or entries generally

[11] Why Google Poses a Serious Threat to Democracy, and How to End That Threat

[12]  Audit électoral aux USA : la saga continue | FranceSoir

[13] https://americasdigitalshield.com/

[14] President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Farewell Address (1961) | National Archives