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2020 Election at Stake: Google Insider and Pysch Expert Warn Tech Giants Could Unfairly Shift Outcome

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A top social scientist and now a Google whistleblower both say the tech giant could sway millions of undecided voters and ultimately the election in 2020. Their concern includes Google's search engine which they say skews results to favor a liberal agenda.

Former Google employee Zachary Vorhies told the investigative organization Project Veritas he has proof that Google actively shuts out conservative and Christian voices.

Vorhies says that while working at Google he found documents showing that it blacklists conservative websites, including Glenn Beck's and Rush Limbaugh's as well as Christian websites like the Christian Post and the Catholic News Agency. CBN News apparently was not blacklisted.

The blacklist restricts the websites from appearing on news feeds for an Android Google product.

Vorhies says the documents, as well as internal speeches made by Google executives during his 8 years there, show their motives. "They were intending to sculpt the information landscape so that they could create their own version of what was objectively true," he said. 

Radio host Glenn Beck told CBN News that his organization is talking with Google about being blacklisted and said he wants to warn others about what's happening. 
 
"We know they are outwardly banning and I think it's really more of depersonizing people. You're just disappearing. It's very reminiscent of China," he said. "They are getting more and more subtle with their algorithms. This poses a great, great danger to our republic."

Vorhies says he has close to a thousand documents that show this manipulation and he's delivered them to the anti-trust division at the Department of Justice. CBN News requested more information from the department but it declined to comment.
   
Just last December, Google's CEO went before Congress and denied that the tech giant tries to influence political thinking and behavior. 

"I lead this company without political bias and work to ensure that our products continue to operate that way," said Sundar Pichai. "To do otherwise would be against our core principles."

Vorhies says that's not true. "You know, if Google wants to have political bias and they want to say that they have political bias that is their right as a company," he said. "But for them to go under oath and say that these blacklists don't exist while employees like me are able to just search through the internal search engine of the company and see that they do is hypocritical at the least and it's perjury at the worst."

Dr. Robert Epstein, the former editor-in-chief of Psychology Today and a longtime Hillary Clinton supporter, says he's studied Google since 2016 and he's worried about what it might do to influence the election in 2020.

In June, he told Congress that Google search results in 2016 were significantly skewed in favor of Clinton.  Epstein says his research shows that they can shift the voting preferences of undecided voters by 20 percent. 

BELOW: Epstein testifies before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution

Epstein told the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution that he saved 13,000 election-related search results by a diverse group of Americans on Google, Bing and Yahoo in the weeks leading up to the election. The Google search results were significantly biased in favor of Clinton in all 10 positions on the first page of search results. Epstein, who studies behavioral psychology, says the search algorithm likely pushed at least 2.6 million undecided voters to vote for Clinton.

Epstein says he's worried about Google and other tech giants unfairly influencing voters in the next election.

"In 2020, you can bet that all of these companies are going to go all out, and the methods they're using are invisible. They're subliminal. They're more powerful than any effects I've seen in the behavioral sciences and I've been in the behavioral sciences for almost 40 years," he told the subcommittee.

Epstein is calling for Congress to begin large-scale monitoring of search results. 

And Vorhies is hoping the Department of Justice will begin to seriously investigate Google and whether or not it's shutting out certain voices.
 
 

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About The Author

Heather
Sells

Heather Sells covers wide-ranging stories for CBN News that include religious liberty, ministry trends, immigration, and education. She’s known for telling personal stories that capture the issues of the day, from the border sheriff who rescues migrants in the desert to the parents struggling with a child that identifies as transgender. In the last year, she has reported on immigration at the Texas border, from Washington, D.C., in advance of the Dobbs abortion case, at crisis pregnancy centers in Massachusetts, and on sexual abuse reform at the annual Southern Baptist meeting in Anaheim