The Google search engine is capable of seriously manipulating people's minds. If desired, the corporation can even independently choose the president of the United States, simply by changing the search results, says Robert Epstein, an American psychologist.
Epstein has been researching the impact of search engines on consciousness since 2013. “Half of people are limited to only the first two lines of search results. And only a tenth of users goes to the second page,”the researcher says.
Google can dramatically change the political preferences of voters, he adds. The scientist conducted a series of experiments with the participation of two thousand Americans, on the basis of which he found that manipulation of search results affects 80% of the subjects whose political preferences shifted in the direction the experimenter needed.
The decision about the order in which the search results should be arranged is made, according to the developers from Google, by a special automatic algorithm that takes into account many factors. But some experts are sure that it costs nothing for a corporation to sometimes interfere with the operation of the algorithm and manually adjust the issue.
Kolesnikov Andrey