In the future, Big Data will make actual voting obsolete

[Commentary] Because I conduct research on how the Internet affects elections, journalists have lately been asking me about the primaries. Here are the two most common questions I’ve been getting: Do Google’s search rankings affect how people vote? How well does Google Trends predict the winner of each primary?

My answer to the first question is: Probably, but no one knows for sure. From research I have been conducting in recent years with Ronald E. Robertson, my associate at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology, on the Search Engine Manipulation Effect (SEME, pronounced “seem”), we know that when higher search results make one candidate look better than another, an enormous number of votes will be driven toward the higher-ranked candidate—up to 80% of undecided voters in some demographic groups. This is partly because we have all learned to trust high-ranked search results, but it is mainly because we are lazy; search engine users generally click on just the top one or two items. Because no one actually tracks search rankings, however—they are ephemeral and personalized, after all, which makes them virtually impossible to track—and because no whistleblowers have yet come forward from any of the search engine companies, we cannot know for sure whether search rankings are consistently favoring one candidate or another. This means we also cannot know for sure how search rankings are affecting elections. We know the power they have to do so, but that’s it.

[Robert Epstein is a Senior research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology]