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user-inactivated  ·  3163 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: How Google could rig the 2016 election

Yes, I saw that.

    Search rankings for the three experiments in study 1. (A) For subjects in group 1 of experiment 1, 30 search results that linked to 30 corresponding Web pages were ranked in a fixed order that favored candidate Julia Gillard, as follows: those favoring Gillard (from highest to lowest rated pages), then those favoring neither candidate, then those favoring Abbott (from lowest to highest rated pages). (B) For subjects in group 2 of experiment 1, the search results were displayed in precisely the opposite order so that they favored the opposing candidate, Tony Abbott. (C) For subjects in group 3 of experiment 1 (the control group), the ranking favored neither candidate. (D) For subjects in groups 1 and 2 of experiment 2, the rankings bias was masked slightly by swapping results that had originally appeared in positions 4 and 27. Thus, on the first page of search results, five of the six results—all but the one in the fourth position—favored one candidate. (E) For subjects in groups 1 and 2 of experiment 3, a more aggressive mask was used by swapping results that had originally appeared in positions 3 and 28.

I don't see anywhere they actually found evidence of Google manipulating election related results. The most relevant aspect of their paper talked about a hypothetical test they ran, where they deliberately presented three different types of search results (that they created themselves) to three different groups, and showing that whatever their fake search results showed to the test group, said test group was biased in its favor.

That's the extent of the evidence based data I could find. Everything else was a bunch of "could", "might" and so forth.

If the entire point of this was to show that people can be swayed by how information is presented to them, that is a basic psychological fact that has been scientifically tested and proven time and time again, in a variety of experiments and studies. So what's the real point of the paper, and why was the name "Google" dragged into it?

Again, I might be missing something.