Search Engine Manipulation Effect (SEME)

[Vince Koloski]

New article by Robert Epstein who has been studying search engine results and their effect on the decision making of individuals. He reports the results of a number of studies he has done and speculates on further possibilities. He mentions the Facebook 2010 "go out and vote" push and speculates that were Facebook to attempt to encourage voters it knows to be leaning towards candidates that would push Facebook friendly policies to vote for said candidates, it would be in line with Facebook executives fiduciary duties to increase shareholder value. He also mentions Eric Schmidt's Hillary promoting startup Groundwork as well. Check out its cool website. He talks about government social control as well and China's Social Credit System in particular in which they hope to have all 1.3 billion citizens in a trackable database by 2020. He also talks about the vast amounts of data that Google has on us all and the difficulties of avoiding that data warehousing when many other providers gather their original data from Google. 

It makes me want to go back and reread David Brin's "The Transparent Society" and try to regain my optimism.