Psychologist Robert Epstein tells 'Tucker Carlson Tonight' how social media giants are interfering in the US election
This is an unofficial transcript meant for reference. Accuracy is not guaranteed.
When we first heard
someone suggest years ago that
the big tech companies now the
monopolies might intervene on
behalf of a candidate in an
american election, it seemed
far fetched
now. It seems obvious that is
happening, no question.
So far, tech monopolies have
censored reporting on the by the
family. They silenced
politicians, they dont, like
theyd, be plat formed any user
who deviates from a narrowly
prescribed a set of approved
ideas.
They also have other less
obvious ways to influence the
election.
Google can offer a biased search
suggestion and does
Youtube gets to pick the next
video you watch whats the
effect of all of this
much more profound than anything
any foreign country is doing to
us.
Dr Robert Epstein has been
studying tech and its effect on
politics. For years, hes
expressed concern about the
power of tech monopolies. On this
show he did it two years ago.
We should be paranoid, because
what Google and Facebook can do
is really mind boggling
if, for example, Mark Zuckerberg
on election day last year. If he
had chosen to press the enter
key early morning and just sent
out a message to Hillary Clinton,
supporters, only saying go out
and vote go out and vote
reminder
that would have sent her an
additional four hundred and fifty thousand voters that
day with no one knowing this had
occurred.
When you control
all the information you control,
what people know and believe
you control peoples, minds
whats the practical effect of
that control four days out from
a presidential election, and is
there anything we could do about
it
doctor thanks so much for
coming on
first to the practical effects,
what do you think big Tex
Interference would do to the
election results
based on the data come up?
What we are seeing is the
president nationwide. They are
probably shifting this year in
the selection, fifteen million votes
without anyones awareness,
except for what im doing
without leaving a paper trail
for authorities to trace.
How are they doing
that?
They are doing it with bias
in search results which,
basically no one can see. It
would be very tough to see
weve been measuring that now,
with about six hundred field agents in
the swing states and just based
on the first hundred fifty thousand
searches that weve looked at
thats about one point: five million search
results and over a million
web pages, we are finding very
substantial pro liberal bias in
all ten or at least nine out of ten
search results on the first page
of Google search results, strong
liberal bias
not on being or Yahoo, and we are
seeing that bias in every
demographic group
and one report we generated
recently, we saw more liberal
bias in Google content going to
conservatives than going to
liberals
interesting,
that is the deposition definitio
propaganda, tailoring
information to change the views
of people in a targeted way,
its immoral and election
interference. Its is it illegal.
We have campaign finance laws
dont. We
there is no specific laws or
regulations in place. Stopping a
company like Google from doing
things like this, and they said
they can exercise their free
speech rights and to show people
anything they want to show
people.
You could look at this as an
extreme violation of campaign
finance laws.
In effect, they are making huge
in kind donations to one party
one candidate. It doesnt cost
them a dime, but thats, not the
issue.
The issue is: what would it cost
you to do it or what would it
cost me to do it and we are
talking tens of millions of
dollars at least
one of the reasons
this is so corrosive is because
its so difficult to measure- and
it makes everybody paranoid and
distrustful and undermines
confidence in the system, because
you cant see it. As you said,
how do we prevent the replay of
this not just to stop helping
Democrats for the sake of our
collective confidence in our
system?
I think theres only one way
to do it. I dont think laws and
regulations can keep up with
tech.
Ive been in touch with a lot of
members of Congress, a lot of
attorneys general. They are all
very frustrated.
I think we do it with monitoring
systems with large scale,
Nielsen type monitoring systems.
We have more than six hundred field
agents this year in the swing
states. We will probably have
seven or eight hundred by election day and
what happens in that case is,
with their permission, we are
using software to look over
their shoulders and see what
these tech companies, Google,
Yahoo, Facebook and more see
what these tech companies are,
showing them
real people. They have to be
real people, Republicans,
Democrats, independents and we
aggregate that data, and we look
for shenanigans.
We look for targeted messages,
we look for bias and we are
doing it on a massive scale and
preserving that information.
I think that is how you defend
democracy.
I agree with that
completely. They must hate you.
Transcript generated on 2020-10-31.