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Flashmag April 2019 www.flashmag.net
titled this phenomenon SEME search engine manipulation effect. In the 2012 US presidential election, Google and its leaders donated more than $ 800,000 to President Barack Obama and $ 37,000 to his opponent, Mitt Romney. And in 2015, a team of researchers from the University of Maryland and elsewhere showed that Google's search results consistently favored Democratic candidates. Are Google's search rankings really biased? An internal report published in 2012 by the US Federal Trade Commission concluded that Google's rankings in searches consistently put Google's financial interests above those of its competitors.
In most countries, 90% of online searches are done on Google, giving even more power to the multinational, to drastically influence the elections in case the access to the Internet becomes better. In their investigation Robert Epstein and Ronald E Robertson found that Google now had the power to overturn 25% of national elections in the world, without anyone knowing that this was happening. And because
the search rankings are ephemeral, they leave no written record, which gives the company complete denial. Apart, from the case Cambridge Analytica, Facebook was cited in a study by Robert M. Bond, now professor of political science at Ohio State University. In 2012, he described an ethically dubious experiment in which, on polling day 2010, Facebook sent reminders of "going out and voting" to 60 million of its specially targeted users. The reminders drove about 340,000 people who would otherwise not have been able to vote, to vote. In an article in The New Republic in 2014, Jonathan Zittrain, University professor of international law at Harvard, pointed out that, given the wealth of information collected about its users, Facebook could easily send such messages only to people who support a party. Or a candidate, which could easily trigger a close election - without anyone knowing that this has happened. And since advertisements, like search rankings, are ephemeral, manipulating an election in this way