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A demonstrator during an Amazon Labor Union rally outside an Amazon warehouse in the Staten Island, New York, on April 11, 2023. (Paul Frangipane / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Last week, Shawn Fain, the newly elected president of the United Auto Workers (UAW) traveled from Detroit to Washington, DC, to meet with Sean O’Brien, who won in an upset over James P. Hoffa’s chosen successor to take the helm of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. The same week, the Teamsters announced that they had organized a union of Amazon delivery drivers in California and negotiated the first tentative union contract of Amazon workers in the United States (though what followed is complicated), and workers voted to unionize their 1,100-person workplace at logistics giant DHL.
Also last week: the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) went to federal court seeking an injunction to reinstate fired Starbucks worker Jaysin Saxton, and the board wants a nationwide cease and desist order against Starbucks for firing union supporters. Workers at a Manhattan Barnes & Noble filed an NLRB petition for a union election; they are not the first location to do so. Some 5,700 graduate students at Stanford University also filed with the NLRB, the largest union election petition of the year thus far; University of Minnesota graduate students won a union by a landslide, with 2,487 votes in favor of unionizing and a mere 70 against; and University of Michigan graduate students continued to strike even in the face of police harassment and arrests.
That’s a far from comprehensive look at the US labor movement activity last week, but it is a revealing snapshot of contemporary working-class organization on May Day 2023. The reform movements in both the UAW and the Teamsters, while each distinct in their character, have the wind at their backs. And while union leaders tend to use fiery rhetoric no matter what their actual plans may be, all signs suggest that the two unions, representing a powerful set of manufacturing and logistics workers, are starting to change the way they operate.
Both unions are also preparing to negotiate their largest contracts and vowing to strike if necessary. The Teamsters’ nearly 350,000-worker contract with the United Parcel Service (UPS) expires on July 31, and the UAW’s 150,000-worker contract with the Big Three automakers expires on September 14. As newly elected UAW Region 9A director Brandon Mancilla put it at a recent New York fundraiser for the Teamsters for a Democratic Union, “United, the entire labor movement is going to get what we deserve.”
Another agenda item for the reformers both in the UAW and the Teamsters is new organizing in workplaces where a lack of unions not only means low wages for those workers but also poses an existential threat for their unionized counterparts. At the UAW, the priority is electric vehicle (EV) plants, which automakers have largely managed to keep nonunion; where workers have unionized EV plants, they still receive lower wages and less benefits than the majority of workers covered by the union’s Big Three master contract.
For the Teamsters, the priority is Amazon. While the Palmdale, California, delivery workers are the first formal bargaining unit to result from the Teamsters’ vow to organize the tech behemoth, the coming year will likely see new unions emerge — and not only among delivery drivers but at warehouses or Amazon’s smaller delivery stations, too. The Teamsters cannot evade the challenge of organizing Amazon, no matter how complicated it may be, or the company’s nonunion drivers will continue to undercut the union’s hard-won compensation and standards.
More generally, Amazon organizing has hit foreseeable walls. The Amazon Labor Union (ALU), which won an NLRB union election at JFK8, a massive warehouse in Staten Island, New York, has not yet forced Amazon to the bargaining table. The union has suffered setbacks elsewhere, too, losing NLRB elections at LDJ5 (a smaller warehouse next to JFK8) and ALB1 (a warehouse in upstate New York) and withdrawing an election petition at ONT8 (in Moreno Valley, California). No other existing unions have filed for an NLRB election at an Amazon warehouse after the loss in Bessemer, Alabama.
As for other new organizing that has inspired workers across the country and captured public attention, it continues apace: campaigns at Chipotle, Ben & Jerry’s, REI, Trader Joe’s, and Apple. So, too, does organizing in higher education and health care. And it shouldn’t be forgotten that the key force behind Brandon Johnson’s win in the Chicago mayoral election was the Chicago Teachers Union. But new organizing, particularly in the almost entirely nonunion private sector (2022 unionization rate: 6 percent) faces the same obstacle as JFK8 and Starbucks workers: retaliatory firings and employers’ refusal to bargain.
How can workers not only force employers to the bargaining table but win a first contract? No one has an easy answer. Those on the Left of the labor movement often speak of strikes for recognition as a more militant means of forcing an employer to stop fighting unionization, but some workers, especially those at Starbucks, have been striking to reinstate fired coworkers and to pressure the company to come to the bargaining table, too. While they’ve had some success in the former aim, there is little progress thus far in the latter. The coffee giant continues systematically violating labor law, going so far as to fire several union supporters, including one who many consider the union campaign’s founder, a mere two days after Howard Schultz testified at a Senate hearing chaired by Bernie Sanders, the title of which was “No Company Is Above the Law: The Need to End Illegal Union Busting at Starbucks.” Who will stop them?
Similarly, it’s hard to imagine what it will take to force Amazon to sit down across a bargaining table with the ALU — a spate of new organizing campaigns at other Amazon facilities, paired with a credible strike threat at JFK8, at the very least.
And there’s another concerning trend. Conservatives are engaged in a campaign that uses bigotry to accelerate the decimation of public sector unions. The strategy is most obvious in the wave of book bans and more general hysteria over the possibility that teachers and librarians might reveal to students that there is such a thing as being gay or trans or black, banning discussion of “identity politics” and “critical race theory,” both of which are rarely defined. Such fearmongering works as a wedge, a way in to stripping workers of funding, union security, and workplace democracy.
It is an attack on unions and the public sector in general. This is made explicit by many of the strategy’s architects. As Kelly Craft, a Republican candidate for Kentucky governor, put it in a bizarre campaign ad that features purple-haired “woke bureaucrats” parachuting into a public school to force students to learn about pronouns, “I will dismantle the Kentucky Department of Education.”
Will the heightened interest in union organizing, particularly among young people (and especially among those who supported Bernie Sanders, some of whom are at the heart of the biggest labor stories of the past few years) translate into a revival of working-class organization, a reining in of capital’s near-absolute rule? Will we figure out how to surmount the obstacles to organizing so that some of the millions of Americans who say that they want to join a union have an opportunity to do so? Can a militant spirit among the rank and file and reformer leadership at the top reverse the decline in the UAW and the Teamsters, much less transform them into leaders of working-class movements more broadly?
We can’t know unless we try. Fortunately, as I often tell younger socialists wondering how best to contribute to the Left, never in my life has there been a more exciting time to devote oneself to building working-class self-organization. And it’s been a long time since the US labor movement was this open to experimentation. Plus, don’t forget: film and television writers nationwide are poised to strike as soon as tomorrow. If you want to form your own opinions about the state of the US labor movement, walking a picket line is a good place to start.
Cartoon of Andrew Carnegie, 1900. (Udo J. Keppler / Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons)
A foundational belief in capitalist societies is the notion that individuals deserve the income they receive in the market: your bank account reflects your talent and efforts and is therefore rightly yours, and yours alone.
A recent survey found that 66 percent of Republicans believe the rich are rich because they “worked harder” than other people, not because of other advantages in life. As the late conservative activist Herman Cain put it, “Don’t blame Wall Street. Don’t blame the big banks. If you don’t have a job and you’re not rich, blame yourself.”
Hence Bill Gates and Elon Musk truly deserve their mountains of wealth ($110 billion and $190 billion, respectively), whereas disabled people supposedly deserve their paltry earnings of only $25,000 on average per year. Such ideas of deservingness and merit are the mortar between the bricks of our society’s foundation.
But on International Workers’ Day, it’s worth asking: do the rich really deserve their piles of lucre?
The notion that inequality is justified because it reflects individual merit is an old one. Beginning in the decades after the French Revolution, as the old bastions of feudal privilege were decaying, a panicky elite worried that the masses might use their growing democratic powers to equalize wealth. Conservative thinkers started marshaling novel justifications for their riches. In 1872, Émile Boutmy, the founder of the prestigious Parisian university Sciences Po, expressed the mounting elite anxiety like this:
The classes that call themselves superior can preserve their political hegemony only by invoking the law of the most capable. Because the walls of their prerogatives and tradition are crumbling, the democratic tide must be held back by a second rampart made up of brilliant and useful merits, of superiority whose prestige command obedience, of capacities of which it would be folly for society to deprive itself.
The rising discipline of economics would provide much of the ideological ammunition for which the Right was desperately searching. In 1899, the economist John Bates Clark fretted that “workmen” were increasingly embracing the socialist idea that they “are regularly robbed of what they produce” and would thus “become revolutionists.”
John Bates Clark. (Gunton’s Magazine, Vol. 19, 1900 via Wikimedia Commons)
To counteract the dreadful possibility of human beings sharing the fruits of their labor, Clark developed what came to be known as marginal productivity theory. His core claim was that a competitive market will distribute income to each “factor of production” — each worker or each business owner — in accordance with the marginal contribution of each person. Capitalism could thus be portrayed not an exploitative system but a deeply moral one: it gives every person precisely the value they have created.
That meritocratic shibboleth still has deep purchase today. When Occupy Wall Street protests broke out against economic inequality a decade ago, Greg Mankiw, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President George W. Bush, published an influential article entitled “Defending the One Percent.” He repeated Clark’s argument that market incomes, even for the very rich, are not a problem because they simply reflect the enormous value gifts the rich have made to our wellbeing.
Progressives typically reject the meritocratic argument, pointing out that the economic rat race is extremely unfair. Some people are blessed with private inheritance, elite schools, and well-connected family networks, while others are obstructed at every turn by economic insecurity, sexism, and racism. Since there is nothing like equal opportunity, the economy is an uneven playing field, and so the “winners” don’t really deserve their income any more than a heavyweight boxer “deserves” a prize for beating a featherweight, or a Lamborghini driver would “deserve” the yellow jersey for outracing cyclists in the Tour de France.
These progressive arguments are correct as far as they go. The problem is that they don’t go nearly far enough in diagnosing what is wrong with meritocracy.
Mainstream economics, as well as the dominant culture, conceives of earning an income as if we were Robinson Crusoes, producing our own private property out of nothing.
The fundamental problem is that mainstream economics, as well as the dominant culture, typically conceives of earning an income as if we were Robinson Crusoes, producing our own private property out of nothing but the sweat of our brow, then trading newly created property with others in a free market.
This is deeply misleading. Economic production in a modern society is never a solo effort. No one produces anything by themselves. All production is, at root, a fundamentally social and collaborative process.
The often ignored — but truly vast — contribution of other people’s labor is what I call the “understructure.” Consider one mundane example: every day in every city in the Global North, thousands of semitrucks shuttle back and forth carrying our goods. Each one of these trucks can haul roughly seventy-eight thousand pounds and travel approximately two thousand miles before needing to refill its tank. Yet this stupendous feat is not just due to the individual truck driver alone; it is made possible by the countless miles of concrete highways, the years of labor that built them, and the generations of learning that developed concrete; so too with the trucks, with their fuel, and so on.
Economic production in a modern society is never a solo effort. All production is, at root, a fundamentally social and collaborative process.
To get a sense of the potency of this single example, we can ask what it would take for human beings to accomplish this one simple task by simply carrying the goods on our backs. What one truck driver can accomplish in a single day today would take an individual without our modern understructure about 2,700 years.
All production relies on this understructure — the combination of infrastructures, physical assets, institutions, laws, norms, intellectual concepts, emotional supports, and natural resources that underlie and enable production.
Start looking, and you’ll see it everywhere:
The physical infrastructure (such as roads, bridges, railways, water systems, sewers, electricity grids, and telecommunication networks) magnifies the productive capacity of any individual participating in the economy.
The political-legal infrastructure of the state provides the social stability and predictability that is necessary for any market to function well. There is no such thing as a literally “free market.” All market systems are embedded in a political-legal infrastructure; they are shaped and defined by rules, regulations, and institutions. These include a system of property rights that defines who owns what, what is allowed to be sold and what is not, the types of businesses that are permitted to operate (such as corporations or worker cooperatives), the various rights of business owners versus workers (do owners have full or limited liability? Do workers have rights to participate in board governance?), the taxes that must be paid by different parties, a police force to enforce such rights, and a judicial system to adjudicate them.
Workers on the southwestern pylon of the Sydney Harbor Bridge, Sydney, Australia, 1932. (Powerhouse Museum via Wikimedia Commons)
This means that the state and all the various workers who administer and maintain it are “silent partners” in the production of every new piece of private property. They are its cocreators.
Knowledge infrastructure. A major source of modern prosperity (if not the most important one) is the accumulated collective knowledge that we inherit from the past. The bulk of our modern wealth cannot be attributed to the effort or investment decisions of isolated individuals, but is rather the result of individuals building on the immense knowledge infrastructure passed down to us via vast networks of engineers, scientists, theorists, technicians, teachers, scholars, practitioners, and so on.
Care infrastructure. Perhaps the most commonly neglected of this bunch, care is, among other things, the production of human capacity. None of us could walk, talk, or think were it not for our caregivers. This is most obvious in early childhood, but it persists more subtly throughout our lives as we rely on friends, families, and lovers. Care is thus the invisible infrastructure of (mostly feminine) labor that we all climb on to reach our goals.
Even the very paragon of liberalism, Adam Smith, would not have been able to walk, talk, or sit upright (much less produce economic theory) were it not for Margaret Douglas, his mother (and the broader web of care). Though Smith despised “dependency,” he was deeply dependent on his mother, who cooked his meals every day and provided continual emotional sustenance, allowing him to work away on the book — The Wealth of Nations — that would celebrate economic independence.
Even the very paragon of liberalism, Adam Smith, would not have been able to walk, talk, or sit upright (much less produce economic theory) were it not for Margaret Douglas, his mother.
The estimated cost of parenting (in other words, how much one would have to pay others to do it) is roughly 30 percent of GDP, a truly gigantic cost. Yet the true magnitude for private business is arguably even higher, since if there were literally no care, no business could function at all. If workers (and consumers) were not nurtured and socialized by their caregivers, they would either be dead or extremely debilitated. We see this in rare tragic cases like that of Genie — the mid-twentieth-century child locked away by her father from the age of twenty months to thirteen years. Her isolation left her severely disabled, incontinent, and unable to speak or make any noise beyond a croaking sound. Although she has now gone through over forty years of attempted rehabilitation, she continues to live as a ward of the state and, according to recent reports, is still speechless and severely impaired.
Natural environment. Ecological systems are a vital component of the understructure in that they provide the basic prerequisites for life itself. The environment is a vital support, a container, and a fixed boundary for every economic system. Natural resources — in particular, energy resources (oil, gas, coal, wood, sun, wind, etc.) — furnish the basic fuel for the economy.
Our cars, homes, workplaces — indeed, much of complex industrial life itself — are only possible because they are powered by a massive natural inheritance of fossil fuels. And if we are able to transform our economies to use renewable energy, they will still be fed and sustained by the immense power contained within various natural resources.
Defenders of meritocracy love holding up Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk, justifying their wealth by pointing out that millions of people voluntarily, and eagerly, purchase their products.
But we can now see the truth of the matter. Bill Gates, for instance, was only able to create Microsoft products with the help of an immense understructure: a wide network of parents and teachers who socialized him; a safe community; generations of scientists and computer engineers who created the vast intellectual edifice for him to build on (plus the countless ancillary workers and caregivers supporting them); and a political-legal infrastructure providing him with all kinds of legal rights, such as “shareholder primacy” (allowing him to appropriate the bulk of the profits made by thousands of workers while depriving those workers of any say in firm governance), and perhaps even more important in this case, the privilege of copyright.
Without copyright protection Microsoft products would simply be shared for free, and profits would tank.
Without copyright protection Microsoft products would simply be shared for free, and profits would tank. Copyright is a state-provided monopoly, but there is nothing natural about it. If it were replaced by open-source access (an arguably more efficient system) and coupled with public funding and prizes to reward innovation, Gates’s income would plummet.
Bill Gates is not a giant. He is a regular human being, but one sitting in an operating cabin, controlling a giant and powerful tower crane, looming over all of us.
The essential point is this: one’s total productivity comes in small part from personal inputs (such as talent and effort) but in large part from the societal inputs that one can access. Not only are the societal inputs much more important in terms of one’s total productivity, but they are also a matter of luck, which dramatically advantages some over others, and so undermines any claim of deservingness. The understructure is really a vast social inheritance.
Imagine living in simple hunter-gatherer societies with little accumulated capital, technology, and legal structures. All the “income” generated in such societies stems entirely from the talents and efforts of individuals working in that society. Such income, in other words, may be said to be completely deserved.
How large is this “income”? Angus Maddison has estimated subsistence at roughly $810 per person per year (in 2020 dollars); the World Bank defines “extreme poverty” or “absolute poverty” by the international poverty line of $2.15 per day (in 2017 USD PPP), or $783 per year. So let’s use $800 as a very rough ballpark approximation and compare it to the median income in the United States today — $38,000 — and the average income of the top 1 percent, which was roughly $824,000 (it would be much higher if we included accumulated wealth in addition to income). This means that 98 percent of the income of the contemporary median worker, and a whopping 99.9 percent of the income of the top centile, cannot be attributed to individual effort or talent but is in fact due to the social inheritance provided by the understructure. It is therefore entirely underserved.
The standard meritocratic view of deservingness is a lie and a deception. Modern production is a deeply interdependent process involving the background labor and background institutions of much of the community as well as millions of our ancestors long dead.
The wealth of the rich is not deserved. It is our social inheritance. And we have every right to take it back.
Why Republicans cannot win: Google, Facebook, and other Big Tech companies are manipulating the flow of information to shift elections.
By Robert Epstein, Gatestone Institute
If I could show you some of the data that we collected, you would be astounded.
There is a lot more that we can find. The bottom line on this is going to be that the types of monitoring systems that we have been developing since 2016, I am pretty sure at this point that they need to be permanent, large scale, and operating in all 50 states to protect our free-and-fair elections from interference by tech companies, which can flip elections any and all ways they please without anyone knowing.
Tech will always be far ahead of laws and regulations, but monitoring is also tech. If we are monitoring them, we are doing to them what they do to us 24/7.
When you monitor, you can catch them in their shenanigans, and you can get them to back down. As you’re going to see, apparently, we got Google to back down by exposing some of the manipulations that they were engaging in before the 2020 presidential election.
The Wall Street Journal in 2018 published some emails that had leaked out of Google in which one Google employee is saying to others, “How can we use ephemeral experiences to change people’s views about Trump’s travel ban?”
You may not have heard the term “ephemeral experiences” before. I had never seen it before, but these are very brief experiences that we all have online every single day. They are things like newsfeeds, search results, search suggestions, sequences of YouTube videos. None of that is recorded anywhere. It affects us, as Google executives know full well. In fact, it has a tremendous effect on us.
It just appears, we click, it disappears. It is stored nowhere, it leaves no paper trail for authorities to trace. It can be used to manipulate, and it is being used to manipulate very deliberately and strategically, especially at Google. I think some of the other companies as well have been catching on, especially Facebook.
As it happens, I have been studying ephemeral experiences since early 2013. In 2015, I published my first scientific report on our findings in the proceedings in the [Proceedings of the] National Academy of Sciences.
This report has since been accessed or downloaded at the website of the National Academy of Sciences more than 300,000 times.
This was a very sophisticated study with five experiments and more than 4,000 participants. We showed that when there is bias in search results, first of all, people cannot see it, which makes it perfect as a manipulation device, and leaves no paper trail. Search results, for instance, are ephemeral experiences.
We showed in these controlled experiments that we can easily shift 20 percent or more of undecided voters to one candidate or another as we please – up to 80 percent in some demographic groups – and that was after just one search. With multiple searches having bias, the numbers go up and up and up.
What happens over a period of six months, say, if there is bias in search results? We reported in that paper in PNAS that we felt that as of 2015, you could shift so many votes that way that we calculated that upwards of 25 percent of the national elections in the world, the outcomes of those elections were being determined by Google’s search engine.
Here [on this graph], we are months before an election. I’ve got 300,000 people who are undecided. 300,000 who lean to the right – that is my red curve. 300,000 who lean left — that is my blue curve.
What happens is, we are shifting week by week by week. We are shifting people out of the undecided group into the other groups. They are making up their minds, but because of the bias in search results, anything that they search on, anything political at all, is leading them to Web pages that make one candidate look better than the other.
In this case, the Democrat looks better than the Republican. We keep shifting in this way differentially so that we keep putting more people onto the blue curve and we are putting fewer people onto the red curve.
You play that forward for six months. When you get to the election, you have an enormous gap. You have created a gap of more than 100,000 people between the votes we shift into Democrats and the votes we shift to Republicans — with no one knowing and with no paper trail. That is roughly how this works.
In 2015, I received a call from Jim Hood, who at that time was the Attorney General of Mississippi. He was very concerned about this effect, which we called the Search Engine Manipulation Effect, SEME or “seem,” from a perspective of criminal justice issue. He said to me, “They have this power. How do we know that they are using this power?”
I did not have a good answer for him, but I became somewhat obsessed with trying to figure out a solution to that problem, and in 2016, my team and I developed the first-ever system for doing to the tech companies what they do to us. That is, we are monitoring what they are showing real people on those screens that we are all addicted to every day.
The point is you have to use real people if you are going to monitor them. You cannot do what some professors at Columbia University have done or what reporters of The Economist did. You cannot use an anonymized computer because Google recognizes that easily enough, and they do not send biased anything to such computers.
You have to look over the shoulders of real people. That is what we learned how to do in 2016. We had to recruit people. We had to recruit a very diverse group, obviously, of Democrats, Republicans, Moderates. We had to develop special software that we installed on their computers.
If you go to tamingbigtech.com you can get the piece from 2018 about how we developed that first monitoring system.
In 2016, we recruited 95 field agents in 24 states. We looked over their shoulders, with their permission. We preserved 13,000 ephemeral experiences on Google, Bing, and Yahoo. That means we preserved their searches and the search results and the 100,000 Web pages to which the search results linked. That allowed us to look for bias, to see if there was any bias in those search results.
Indeed, in all the days we looked at before the election, we saw pro-Hillary Clinton bias and never any pro-Trump bias. I was a Clinton supporter, so that was fine with me, but do we really want private companies manipulating elections on a large scale with no one knowing and without a paper trail? That is the question.
This bias was also present in all ten search positions on the first page of Google Search results. These two graphs show something disturbing: the few field agents that we had who were communicating with us by Gmail, they are people who could easily be identified by Google, they saw virtually no bias at all.
In 2018, we expanded the system. We had 160 field agents preserve almost 50,000 ephemeral experiences and about 400,000 Web pages. Again, on all the days we looked at before the elections in 2018, the midterms, we found consistent liberal bias in search results – enough over time, if that bias had been present through six months, to have shifted millions of votes with no one knowing.
There appeared to be Google bias. There was no such bias in the other search engines. This was definitely a Google phenomenon.
We went wild. For the 2020 presidential election, we recruited more than 700 field agents. This time, we focused on swing states where we knew the action would be. We preserved more than 450,000 ephemeral experiences – not just search results – on Google, Bing, Yahoo, the Google Home page, YouTube, and Facebook.
Our field agents were quite diverse. I am going to skip over gender and age. We have a very diverse group and, more importantly, very diverse politically. Here you see the red, that’s conservatives. These are self‑identified, of course. The blue is liberal. The purple is moderate, and so on. That allows us to see whether bias is being directed toward one group or another.
This is five days before the November 3rd election and including November 3rd. Sure enough, once again, we are seeing in that red ellipse, we are seeing Google bias on the liberal side, and no such bias on the other search engine. This is again just summarizing the difference between what Google was showing, which is highly biased in one direction, and what these other search engines were showing.
The other [search engines] do not have much influence on election, however, because they have hardly any users. The question is: was the biased information just going to liberals last fall? The answer is no. In fact, the content going to conservatives was slightly more liberal than the content going to liberals. For all groups, we were getting liberally biased content.
Let’s shift over to Google’s home page. Some people saw vote reminders on Google’s home page, some people saw vote reminders for months. That too can shift votes: who was seeing those vote reminders, which could determine who sends in mail ballots, and can determine who registers to vote.
What you see again is that pattern. It is so disturbing. The highest level of those vote reminders was seen by moderates, then liberals, then conservatives at the bottom — fewer vote reminders going to one particular political group. Over time, that has an incredible impact on an election.
We shift over to YouTube. Again, we collected so much data. YouTube’s “up‑next” algorithm, that is scary, let me tell you. Now 70 percent of the videos in the world that people watch are suggested by Google’s “up‑next” algorithm that basically determines what video comes next.
In one of the links from Google, we have a two‑minute video in which the CEO of Google YouTube, Susan Wojcicki, was telling her employees, explaining to them how they were altering the “up next” algorithm to push up content that they think is valid, and to suppress content that they think is not. Of course, you are all aware of that suppression.
Disturbing results. Over 93 percent of the videos that were being suggested to people, of the political videos in the days leading up to the 2020 election, were deliberately biased. Now were those biased videos suggested to liberals? No.
In fact, more were being suggested to conservatives than liberals. Georgia: We went all out, more than a thousand field agents throughout Georgia. We preserved more than a million ephemeral experiences, and we found something completely different.
Notice I have for the first time a little green smiley face in the upper left. That is because we — apparently by going public with our findings in October and November and December of 2020 — we got Google to stay out of Georgia. This shows you bias on the Google search engine, that line, it is practically at zero.
Google turned off the bias like flipping a light switch, and yes, they have that ability. We know that from Google whistleblowers and leaked documents. Again, comparing the search engines, there was no bias in Google in Georgia. Comparing the Google’s bias in the presidential election to Georgia: again, very high bias in presidential and virtually no bias in Georgia.
Now, how about those go‑vote reminders, which we saw a lot of in the presidential election. Google sent out no go‑vote reminders in Georgia. This tells you, you see, that you can get these companies to back down.
We have graph that shows you the growth of our monitoring systems from 13,000 ephemeral experiences preserved in 2016 to 1.5 million in 2020 and 2021.
Facebook and Instagram, yes, we were monitoring them, but we were not able to stop them. They were definitely sending out lots of vote reminders in Georgia. We are working now to establish a permanent large‑scale modern system in all 50 states.
That is the only way in my opinion to protect democracy, our children, and human autonomy from manipulation by a big tech, and not just the Google of today, but the Google that comes next.
If you can imagine a control room where we have lots of people connected to maybe tens of thousands of field agents around the country, and where we are looking for shenanigans, bias, and manipulations, and which we are exposing as we find them, these companies will back down, and we will preserve the free and fair election.
More information, there is my email address, mygoogleresearch.com, you can get links to all content, and you can also support my work at that link. I mentioned taming big tech. Then aibrt.org, that’s the institute where I do the research.
* * *
Question: In the swing states you studied on November 3, 2020, what was the differential of votes between Trump and Biden, and what would they indicate? Was that a turnable overall number, or what?
Dr. Epstein: If we extrapolated the level of bias that we saw in those four swing states nationwide and go back a few months, assuming that level of bias had been present for a while, that would have shifted in the presidential election a minimum of six million votes to Joe Biden. These are not small effects. These are huge effects.
This is not like all the nonsense you see about – and I’m sorry if I’m offending anyone – but the nonsense about voter fraud. Those are tiny little incidents compared to what is happening here on a massive scale. That is because Google search results are seen each day in the United States 500 million times.
This is not like stuffing a ballot box with a few hundred ballots. This is a massive manipulation. That is why this monitoring has to be set up. No laws, no regulations will ever stop this. Monitoring can stop it cold.
As far as I know, I’m the only one in the world doing this research and this monitoring. That is because Google is paying off everyone else.
Question: What major changes in tech manipulations have you seen since 2016?
Dr. Epstein: Tech manipulations, the only change I have ever seen was what apparently occurred on the night of October 29th, 2020. That is the day that we went public with some of our findings. Google became aware of the massive amount of monitoring that we were doing this time around.
That night, we saw them literally shut off manipulations that they were engaging in. Unfortunately, we also saw them pressure the New York Post into withdrawing a story about our monitoring system.
They fired the reporter. When we were analyzing data, this was a few days before the election, November 3rd. We decided this time around, we are not going to wait until months after the election. We are going to see what we have now. We did some preliminary analyses. We found very high levels of bias and so on.
I had a personal referral to a reporter at the New York Post, Ebony Bowden. She loved the story. Her editor loved the story. She wrote the piece. She read some of it to me on October 29th.
Then, that night, Google changed what they were showing people. Around 11:57 PM that night, the piece got killed. They asked Google to comment before they went to press. They were supposed to go to press the next morning. It was a big story. It was a big story about tech interfering with the election. It was, I thought, powerfully written.
It got killed that night. Of course, I was dealing with them via email very deliberately knowing that all the New York Post‘s emails are shared with Google, which is also true for the New York Times, by the way, and the Guardian, and hundreds of other major news organizations, and schools, and I could go on and on.
I knew I was sharing all this information with Google; that was deliberate on my part. The piece got killed, and then very shortly after that the reporter was fired.
I tried to contact her recently to find out because I would like to obviously keep in touch, but I do not know where she is right now. I know for sure she was very upset when that piece got killed.
They have tremendous power and they exercise it any and all ways they choose.
Other than that, we got Google to back down with this extensive monitoring, these people just proceed with incredible arrogance. They do anything they want because they are completely unregulated.
What I am studying is occurring at a whole different level from voting machines. It is something people cannot see but that has a tremendous impact on thinking, behavior, and voting, but has nothing to do with voting machines. It has to do with the information people are getting when they are online.
They are getting information when they conduct a search on anything at all. We used thousands of neutral search terms this time around to see what information these companies were supplying to people when they were doing searches. People get vote reminders coming on Google’s Home page or Facebook’s Home page.
In other words, people are subjected to influence all day long on their mobile devices, their phones, their computers. That is what we study. It is a very large‑scale manipulation occurring not just in the US, but these companies are impacting more than three billion people this way every single day, 24 hours a day.
I have been in regular touch with members of Congress now for a number of years. I did testify before Congress. There are some members of Congress, Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, and a few others, who are very interested in these issues, state attorneys general who are interested. There are 52 of those state attorneys general involved in an antitrust action against Google.
There is government interest, but without any doubt at all, I can tell you that they are not going to solve these problems. The few public officials we have who are concerned about these kinds of things that I have been studying, they are not going to solve the problem.
If the government passes any kind of legislation at all, if they change any regulations at all, it is all going to be completely toothless. A lot of these people are in Google’s pocket. Even conservative organizations. A lot of conservative organizations now are accepting money, large donations, from Google.
There are conservative organizations that have made a deal with the devil because they are accepting money from Google.
It is not in our government’s interest to change this. They must be rather pleased with what’s happening, especially among Democrats. Of course, Republicans generally do not like regulation. They want the companies to have free rein. Generally, that’s true, but you cannot let the water company have free rein. There are certain companies, say supplying natural gas, which you just have to regulate.
When it comes to control over the gateway to all information around the world, I’m sorry but they have to be strictly regulated. It’s not going to happen, however, because Google owns the Democrats and the Republicans do not like regulation.
You cannot separate the politics here from the real issues.
Our children are being brainwashed 24 hours a day by these tech companies. I have five children. I’m very concerned about this. I do not want my kids and grandkids growing up in a world that is literally being run by private tech companies.
It is necessary to establish permanent large‑scale monitoring systems. That is what I am focused on right now.
I am still in touch with members of Congress, with the Attorneys General. Anyone who wants to listen to me, I’m happy to help them. I’m still doing that, but I do not have any hopes at all that it is going to do any good.
They will levy some big fines. France fined Google $270 million. A judge, I think in Ohio, made a very strong judgment against Google. Those things will continue to happen. The EU has levied €10 billion in fines against Google since 2017; it hasn’t affected them at all.
That stuff will continue, but it is toothless. We are talking about a company whose revenues keep growing by double digits. They will bring in this year $160 billion with an extremely high profit margin. They are growing by leaps and bounds, both Google and Facebook, around the world. Laws and regulations are not going to stop them.
Question: Could you remind us please what the number is that you might need to take the big step. The amount of money, it is tax‑deductible, right?
Dr. Epstein: Oh, yes. The nonprofit side is $50 million. We do not need it all at once. To set up the system in all 50 states, that is a $50 million project. Roughly a million dollars per state. That would allow us to keep the thing going for a long time. In other words, part of that money would be going towards development efforts.
Then for people who want to make investments on the for‑profit side, we are willing to work with people because there is room here to establish a for‑profit company, a Hewlett Packard if you want to think of it that way, that provides commercial services for organizations, campaigns, law firms, companies of all sorts that want to monitor these tech companies.
There is room for a big commercial operation as well. Then the commercial operation, the for‑profit, could and over the long term be helping to support the nonprofit, which is where we would do this very sensitive monitoring such as the election monitoring.
Question: Please what is your opinion of the Supreme Court in all this? Clarence Thomas and Justice Alito wanted to see evidence presented. The other judges apparently shot that down. Any idea what they could have been thinking?
Dr. Epstein: It’s hard to understand what’s happening there. Especially, it’s hard to understand their attitudes towards tech. I’m in a waiting mode when it comes to the Supreme Court. Remember, again, Republicans do not like regulation. I’m holding my breath here.
Eventually, when some of the big cases against big tech go to the Supreme Court which is inevitable, I have no idea at the moment what the Supreme Court will do because we are, especially conservatives, are very anti‑regulation. People do not understand that we have to make an exception for these tech companies.
We have to understand that they are as essential now as air and water. They must be regulated. Access to all information, the gateway to all information, that has to be regulated. Our brains are shaped according to the information we receive. We have to protect that process.
Question: Our politicians take an oath of office to uphold the laws of the constitution. Clearly, many are not doing that. Is there anything you say that can be done to hold them to their office?
Dr. Epstein: There are members of Congress who get it, who understand. Then there are people who go with the donors. I can give you an example. Elizabeth Warren was one of the early members of Congress to publish a plan for regulating big tech or “breaking them up.” That is complete nonsense.
You cannot break up the Google search engine, for example. It will not work. You cannot break up Facebook’s social media platform. You would be splitting families in half around the world. By the way, Google is one of Elizabeth Warren’s major donors. I bet you that breakup plan that she proposed was actually developed at Google.
If you “break up big tech,” all you are doing is forcing them to sell off a few of the companies they bought. Google buys on average another company every week. That just enriches them. It enriches the major shareholders.
It does not take away the three big threats: the threat to democracy, the threat to free speech, and of course the manipulation and the surveillance that’s occurring. “Breaking them up” will have no impact on the big threats that these companies pose.
Question: Do you see anything that could be done to ensure that when all these people take the oath of office, it is done seriously?
Dr. Epstein: I am a very optimistic, idealistic person, always have been. When it comes to politics, we have to face the sad truth. People are generally out for themselves. They often put their personal priorities and their desire to get reelected ahead of their ideals, the ideals of this country, or the ideals that are embodied in the constitution. We’ve all seen this over and over again.
I can tell you, by the way, here that a lot of the emails I send to people end up in their spam boxes because most people use Gmail. Google blocks my emails.
At one point, they blocked my access to the Google search engine. I have screenshots showing people what they have never seen before, which is timeouts when I’m trying to connect to the Google search engine. I no longer use any Google products at all.
For those of you who might be interested in privacy issues, you should go to an article of mine, which is at myprivacytips.com. That’s where you’ll see my essay on how to increase your privacy, protect the privacy of your kids. That begins with the sentence “I have not received a targeted ad on my phone or computer since 2014.” I’ve gotten much smarter in how I use technology.
It is a very useful link. Then mygoogleresearch.com, that is where there are links to of my work. Those are the main places for people to get information.
I published an article, I think it was in the Epoch Times, explaining why in general, Republicans cannot win. It is because there are so many different methods available to these tech companies for manipulating opinions and votes without people’s awareness. We have discovered about a dozen of them since 2013.
Right now, we are studying one called the YouTube Manipulation Effect, or YME. We are quantifying the impact of that “up‑next” algorithm. The impact of supplying people with video after video after video, which might, in fact, be very biased, as we found in our election monitoring where highly biased videos were being suggested.
If you think of all of these different techniques and imagine them all being used at the same time, and imagine the major tech companies all having the same politics, we’re talking about an unstoppable force, especially when you throw in with that the fact that 96% of donations from Google go to members of one party.
It happens to be the party that I like, but still how do you stop a force that has access to all of those different means of manipulation and is using them? This is what all the whistleblowers have told us in the past couple of years.
That is what all the leaked documents have shown us, the leaked videos, the leaked emails. It is all very consistent. Yet these people go in front of Congress and they just lie, lie, lie, lie, lie. Congress does not even call them on it.
Question: What are some of the lies, are there examples?
Dr. Epstein: For goodness’ sake, right before I testified, which was in summer of 2019. Google was asked, under oath, I believe it was by Senator Josh Hawley, he was asked, “Does Google have any blacklist?” The Google person said, under oath, on camera, “No, Senator. We do not.”
It was not many months later that Zach Vorhies, who had been a senior software engineer at Google for eight and a half years, walks out of Google with 950 pages of documents and a video, which he sent immediately to the Attorney General of the United States, in which there were blacklists among other things. Actual Google blacklists that are labeled “blacklists.”
Again, think of the arrogance. Shouldn’t you call them something else? I would. They were actually called blacklists. The blacklists are real. I published a big investigative piece in U.S. News & World Report, I think that was in 2016 or so, which is called “The New Censorship.” It was about nine of Google’s blacklists.
I had never seen one, but I know as a programmer that they must exist. It’s one of the simplest ways that they can manipulate people, just by adding names or websites to blacklists, and then making sure that content is suppressed. Very, very simple programming technique.
Again, I wrote about nine blacklists while not having seen them. It was much later that Vorhies walks with actual Google blacklists. Meanwhile, Google’s representatives, Congress says under oath, “No, Senator. We have no backlist.”
Question: What, in your view, can or should be done to ensure a free and fair election in 2022 and beyond? Do you see any of that is possible and able to happen?
Dr. Epstein: I published an article in Bloomberg Business Week the day before I testified before Congress. There is a simple way to end Google’s monopoly on search, their index, their big database they use to generate search results, just make it public.
That is a very simple, very low‑key regulation. There’s ample precedent for it. That would be great, but that would require people in DC getting their act together. I do not think it is going to happen.
The only other method that we have to assure fair elections in 2022 is monitoring. We know how to do it, and on a very large scale. It is just money. It is not even, in the grand scheme of things, much money.
When you consider that we are spending billions now in campaigns, $50 million to get this system going is not all that much. That is how you do it. We not only can collect the data very, very rapidly and analyze it rapidly, we know now that we can get these companies to back off.
Of course, if we have massive amount of data incriminating them, they would be risking not only massive fines, but they would be risking criminal charges. They would be risking going to prison if they did not back off. If they knew these systems were running 24/7, they wouldn’t even try these manipulations. They wouldn’t even dare to do these things.
Question: These big tech companies, is it ideological with them, or they looking for cheap labor? What are they thinking?
Dr. Epstein: It depends on the company. With Google, it is definitely ideology. It was founded by people who are utopians, and utopians can be very dangerous people. They hire people who share their views, their visions, their politics.
One of the leaks from Google, not long ago, was an eight‑minute video called “The Selfish Ledger,” about the ability Google has to re‑engineer humanity according to company values. I can send you a link to a transcript I made of the film, and I can send you a link to the film itself, which leaked from the company.
Ideology is a big part of what Google is doing, no question about it. All the whistleblowers have repeated this. Facebook is harder to figure out because it is run with an iron hand by one man, Mark Zuckerberg. I think he is more interested in money than anything else.
Google is the biggest threat. They have the most power to manipulate, and they do so aggressively and strategically unapologetically. They are extremely arrogant people who think they have the power of gods. You know what? They do, and they exercise it.
Dr. Robert Epstein is Senior Research Psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology (AIBRT). A Ph.D. of Harvard University, he has been a pioneer in discovering and studying the power that Google and other tech companies have to manipulate our elections, indoctrinate our children, and undermine our autonomy and freedom.
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