The Patriot Post® · The Biggest Threat to 'Free and Fair' Elections: BIG Tech

“We should be unfaithful to ourselves if we should ever lose sight of the danger to our liberties if anything partial or extraneous should infect the purity of our free, fair, virtuous, and independent elections.” —John Adams (1797)

The Democrat Party and its Leftmedia propagandists have spent most of the last three years telling us that Donald Trump colluded with the Russians to steal the 2016 election.

But in truth, we now know that this was an epic charade set up by way of real collusion between the Obama administration, Hillary Clinton, and the Democrat National Committee. Most significant is the fact that Demo operatives at the highest levels of the Department of Justice gave this political ruse its rise.¹

Their goal? To ensure the appointment of a special counsel and a subsequent investigation to end the Trump presidency, or at the very least undermine his administration’s policies by calling into question the legitimacy of his presidency.

We also know that the Russians did meddle in the election, mostly by way of odd and inconsequential social-media posts, as well as by hacking into the DNC server and releasing some embarrassing email exchanges between Demo bureaucrats.

But foreign election meddling is nothing new, and there isn’t a shred of evidence that Russian interference in 2016 changed even a single vote.

By comparison, it is the Demo/MSM tag team that has posed the biggest threat to free and fair elections for almost 50 years — and it is remarkable to think how different our current political landscape would look if the media coverage was actually balanced. The Leftmedia’s “in kind” donations to Democrat candidates are the equivalent of billions of dollars in promotional advertising — but not a dime of it is ever declared.

By the way, if Democrats actually cared about electoral integrity today, why do they oppose the most basic requirement that voters must have an ID?

More recently, however, efforts to corrupt the process have been bolstered exponentially by homegrown aggressors whose influence on the 2016 and 2018 elections went virtually unnoticed, but whose influence will have an enormous impact on the 2020 election and those beyond.

While the Demo/MSM was distracting the nation with Trump/Russia collusion claims, the BIG Tech social-media behemoths were busy perfecting the means to shape opinions and, thus, shape election outcomes.

The biggest offenders are Facebook and Google (both under leftist management), which have institutionalized the use of automated algorithms designed to influence the political views of tens of millions of their customers, thus undermining national, state, and even local elections. And, in a remarkable example of the “BIG Lie” hubris, they’ve done so while pretending to oppose and ferret out “fake news” on their respective platforms.

You likely missed some very compelling Senate testimony earlier this month about how Big Tech is corrupting our elections. That testimony was delivered by an avowed Democrat who has used his expertise to decode and expose how these all-powerful social-media influencers are shaping our elections — and how they’ll do so again in 2020 on an accelerated scale.

The former editor-in-chief of Psychology Today, Dr. Robert Epstein, a Harvard-educated Clinton supporter and the senior research psychologist with the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology (IBRTA), opened his testimony by declaring, “I love America and democracy [but] I am not a conservative. I have been center/center-left my whole adult life.” He continued, “I believe in a free and fair election more than I have any kind of allegiance to a candidate or a party.”

Highlighting some of the most revealing aspects of Epstein’s research, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) asked him, “Google is, through biased search results, manipulating voters in a way they are not aware of?”

Epstein replied, “On a massive scale.”

He noted that IBRTA’s research indicated that biased Google search results provided 2.6 million votes to Clinton in 2016, but clarified, “That 2.6 million is a rock-bottom minimum.”

He then provided more detail: “The range is between 2.6 and 10.4 million [votes], depending on how aggressively they use the techniques that I’ve been studying now for six and a half years … such as the search engine manipulation effect, the search-suggestion effect, the answer-bot effect and a number of others. They control these and no one can counteract them. These are not competitive; these are tools that they have at their disposal exclusively.”

Regarding the 2018 midterm election, Epstein testified, “In 2018, I’m sure [Facebook and Google] were more aggressive. We have lots of data to support that. And in 2020, you can bet that all of these companies are going to go all out. And the methods that they’re using are invisible, they’re subliminal, they’re more powerful than most any effects I’ve ever seen in the behavioral sciences, and I’ve been in the behavioral sciences for almost 40 years.”

Epstein then dropped this bomb: “In 2020 — if all these companies are supporting the same candidate — there are 15 million votes on the line that can be shifted without people’s knowledge and without leaving a paper trail for authorities to trace.”

Sen. Cruz asked, “A handful of Silicon Valley billionaires and giant corporations are able to spend millions of dollars, if not billions of dollars collectively, massively influencing the results of elections?”

Epstein responded, “Senator, with respect, I must correct you. If Mark Zuckerberg chooses to send out a ‘Go Vote’ reminder just to Democrats on Election Day, that doesn’t cost him a dime.”

And the chorus of whistleblowers from inside these Orwellian giants is growing. Former Google engineer Kevin Cernekee says that Google is preparing to “make sure Trump loses in 2020.”

For the record, The Patriot Post has experienced its own share of abject social-media bias, most recently in the form of Facebook takedowns after one of our posts insisting “there are only two genders” was flagged. Epstein wrote an article in 2017 about Facebook’s algorithms and “the dangers in allowing big technology companies to decide which news stories are legitimate” — like daring to suggest that there are only two genders.

Of course, Big Tech’s defenders were quick to suggest that Epstein’s research was not legitimate. And to provide cover, Facebook just completed its internal “bias audit” that, laughably, determined it was not biased. But Epstein’s research and conclusions are on much firmer scientific ground than the Left’s “climate change” agenda.

Currently, Department of Justice, Federal Trade Commission, and congressional investigators are actively pursuing antitrust actions against Google, Facebook, and other tech giants. State attorneys general may join those actions. And there are significant legal cases being built by content providers like our friends at Prager University after their nonprofit educational media company was placed on YouTube’s “restricted list.”

But if Republican legislators truly understood the threat of speech suppression by the Demos’ Leftmedia and Big Tech propagandists, and the implications for electoral outcomes, they would aggressively pass into law regulations that could immediately curb social media data mining as a means to ensure limits on shadow-banning conservative free speech.

John Adams warned long ago that we must never “lose sight of the danger to our liberties if anything partial or extraneous should infect the purity of our free, fair, virtuous, and independent elections.”

The infection of our elections by Big Tech has now created an epidemic of corruption. Imagine, if you will, what the American political landscape would look like if our national mainstream media outlets were actually neutral in their reporting – conducting themselves as journalists rather than ranting political puppets. It would look much more like what our Founders intended – a nation where protecting Liberty and the Rule of Law enshrined in our Republic’s founding documents, was chief among the concerns of our people.

Footnote 1: Despite the fact that all rational observers have dismissed the “Trump/Russia collusion delusion” as the hoax it was, the diehard Demo “true deceivers” still embrace that narrative and are advancing the threat to impeach Trump in order to obstruct his successful MAGA agenda. This charade certainly threw the 2018 midterm election to the Democrats, so it is understandable why they can’t let go. And they are also promoting a recession that, if they pull it off, may provide them a one-two punch to knock Trump out in 2020.

Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et Fidelis
Pro Deo et Libertate — 1776