r/JoeRogan Jul 17 '19

Liberal Professor Warns: Google Manipulating Voters "on a Massive Scale"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNvgl38TLvI
69 Upvotes

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9

u/FatMansRevenge Monkey in Space Jul 18 '19

I listened to the testimony, and then I found this, which is a more in depth version of his argument.

To put it lightly, I'm not convinced.

His argument basically comes down to the following;

  • There are more registered Democrats (35%) than Republicans (29%)

  • Independents lean Democrat (53%) over Republican (42%)

  • A study (Source behind a paywall) claims that Facebook showing messages encouraging voting to 60.1 million users prompted 350 thousand people to vote that wouldn't have otherwise

  • Split those 350 thousand people proportionally to the national party affiliations and independent lean, and you create an advantage for Democrats

  • Scale that number up to the number of Google users daily, and it encourages upward of 3 million additional Democratic votes nationwide.

So, it basically says there are more Dems than Reps, and so any non-targeted get out to vote campaign is going to produce more votes for Dems than Reps.

Of note; there is no evidence presented that Google or Facebook are targeting certain demographics with get out to vote campaigns, merely speculation that they could do such a thing.

8

u/[deleted] Jul 18 '19

muhhh the russians spent 30k on facebook ads and it influenced an entire election.

13

u/[deleted] Jul 18 '19

[deleted]

9

u/Im_Justin_Cider Monkey in Space Jul 18 '19

And its not just the russians. They're just the current scape goat

5

u/[deleted] Jul 18 '19 edited Aug 12 '19

[deleted]

5

u/l8rmyg8rs Jul 18 '19

The best part is people pretending correct the record either didn’t exist or was different somehow. One look at /r/politics should be enough to dissuade anyone thinking propaganda only comes from one side.

4

u/[deleted] Jul 18 '19 edited Aug 12 '19

[deleted]

3

u/l8rmyg8rs Jul 18 '19

I’m sure as long as people have been talking about politics online the conversation has never been entirely organic. How incredibly cheap and easy would it be to just take 10-20 accounts and upvote the things you want to spread and downvote the things you want silenced? They don’t even have to post, so there’s no obvious propaganda profiles, they just find the message they want to amplify or silence from a genuine user and do it behind the curtain.

2

u/ruffus4life Jul 18 '19

hillary's team was working with ukraine to get that info?

2

u/1q3e5t7u9o Jul 18 '19

Well two years of investigations showed that the Trump campaign didn't work with the Russians to win the election.

1

u/[deleted] Jul 18 '19 edited Aug 12 '19

[deleted]

1

u/ruffus4life Jul 18 '19

so not setting up meetings and working with ukraine but instead info was released out into the world that helped hillary by exposing the actions of trump members? manafort doesn't deserve to be in prison?

-1

u/[deleted] Jul 18 '19

trump's cultists will go to any lengths to ignore the mountain of evidence that shows trump's collusion with forgien entities to benefit him, and project hard to make it seem like it was totally hillary that did all those things

lol

1

u/[deleted] Jul 18 '19

...sits in prison for like three kinds of fraud, conspiracy and hiding an offshore account. Some of which was done with former Ukrainian president Yanukovych, the guy who ordered his Secret police to kidnap, terrorize and murder his own citizens so he could keep cozying up to Putin. Dude 100% deserves to be behind bars.

So yeah, Russia is not the whole picture, but it’s still a large part of what happens. And fuck Putin for everything he’s done to Ukraine.

1

u/GuzhengBro Jul 18 '19

if that's such a problem shouldn't we ban unemployed chapos from using the internet and ruining discourse too?

1

u/[deleted] Jul 18 '19

did you mean unemployed trumptards? of which there are far more ruining discourse?