Prairie State Wire

They’re messing with your heads and your elections, and you probably don’t even know it.

Overwhelming evidence now of record shows how routinely big tech platforms distort news on the internet to manipulate viewpoints or drive voters to certain candidates.

One source alone that has produced thousands of pages of evidence is from what’s shaping up to be a historic lawsuit, Missouri v. Biden. It was brought by the Missouri and Louisiana attorneys general and a number of leading scientists who’ve had their work and other key information censored by social media platforms. Those censored topics include bad news on the economy, the insecurity of voting by mail, the inefficacy of the Covid vaccine and masks and the many scandals brought to light by the Hunter Biden laptop.

Robert Epstein, a Harvard PhD., former editor-in-chief of Psychology Today magazine and formerly a longtime contributing editor at Scientific American, has researched the issue in depth. 

Google’s manipulation alone, Epstein says, “can often produce shifts of 40% or more in the voting preferences of undecided voters without anyone having the slightest idea they have been manipulated.”

Google, like other tech platforms, does that in insidious ways. They know all about you based on your internet habits and interactions. Using that, they send smartly targeted messages and alter search engine results. For example, they send get-out-to-vote messages, which seem harmless, except that they are directed almost entirely to left-leaning voters. 

Many elections are very tight where manipulation can flip the outcome. In 2022, according to Ballotpedia, 46 congressional races (six Senate and 40 House) were decided by five percentage points or fewer. In 2020, 42 congressional races (five Senate and 37 House) were decided by less than a five percentage-point margin, and in 2018, 50 (five Senate and 45 House) were. 

Illinois alone had a total of four congressional races decided by less than a five percent margin in the last two election cycles.

How many more races for Illinois state and local races may have been flipped by tech manipulation? We’ll never know for sure, but the evidence indicates it’s quite a few.

Worst of all, manipulation by tech platforms has been encouraged and even forced by the heavy hand of government. That’s where the evidence in Missouri v. Biden is most frightening. 

In a 154-page ruling last month, a federal judge laid out that evidence in detail. The Biden Administration and the FBI strong-arming social media platforms to squelch unfavorable stories and elevate the left’s narrative of the news.

Issued on Independence Day, that ruling was a gift to America. The evidence of tech manipulation done at the direction of the government was so strong and the matter so important that the judge issued a temporary, sweeping order barring the federal government from most all contact with social media platforms. 

That temporary order was put on hold pending further review, but it’s likely to be made permanent in some fashion, which is what the judge concluded.

You cannot, however, rely on any such order to protect your mind and your elections from manipulation of internet news. Tech platforms will continue distortions on their own. Just recently, for example, YouTube, already widely criticized for biased promotion of partisan videos, announced that it will censor medical information not consistent with advice from the World Health Organization – an organization now heavily criticized for errors and failures on the Covid pandemic.

“It’s really the perfect crime,” wrote Miranda Devine about distortion of news by tech platforms. She’s the journalist who broke the Hunter Biden laptop story – a story those platforms censored. “The problem for the average person trying to guard against the manipulation,” she wrote, “is that you can’t catch Google in the act because its search results or YouTube suggestions are ‘ephemeral,’ meaning they disappear once you click off onto one of the links provided, and can never be recovered.”

The best real protection is your own skepticism and diligence in seeking out the full truth. Today, the distortions favor progressives in power, but that may reverse. No matter what your political stripe, you should abhor distortion of the news and government’s involvement in it.

*Mark Glennon is founder of Wirepoints, an independent research and commentary nonprofit organization.