I rarely learn something that completely blindsides me, this morning that changed rather quickly. I’m a person who doesn’t take coincidence lightly, so what happened had quite the impact, psychologically anyhow. What we’ll be discussing here is a dark pattern used by search engines. This dark pattern is SEME or search engine manipulation effect.
Companies design most dark patterns to get you to make an online purchase or give up your privacy so they can sell your data. However, with the search engine manipulation effect, the goal is less transparent. A SEME can focus on influencing your actions offline. A good example is who you vote for, so just imagine you are undecided between two or three different candidates. I think we can all agree that people have a strong desire for peace, prosperity, and security.
Seeing as how most people desire peace; when presidential candidates run for an elected office, they rarely use war as a selling point, nor do they telegraph that they will commit war before winning the office. Imagine you’re a voter and confused about which of three different candidates you’ll vote for, but you are antiwar. So you go to Google and type in either antiwar candidate or pro-peace candidate and then mash the enter key.
The first thing you will see is the top results, and before Google developed full-blown EVIL; these top results were trustworthy, accurate, and relevant. The old Google trained us to trust and rely upon the results that they ever so diligently fed to us daily, yet, now the worm has turned, and big tech has tipped its hand showing a bias in favor of the left.
So perhaps certain profiled users based on whether or not Google has them labeled as undecided will get top results that look like the following: Joe Biden, a Strong Peace Candidate, or Joe Biden Shows He’s Fervently Anti-War. You see, when someone views a top result, on a subconscious level they trust it, and this can be very persuasive if you’re in autopilot mode or if you are unaware of SEME.
Consider watching the video below where you will see Dr. Robert Epstein explain to congress why he coined the phrase “search engine manipulation effect” and how Google may already be hijacking the 2020 election by manipulating undecided Americans to vote in a prescribed manner.
At first glance, the video may seem dry so I was hoping this post will have whet your appetite a bit and allow you to consider how search engines might be subtly manipulating your behavior in real life.
Additional thoughts inspired by a comment below:
If you consider it further, there are a myriad of ways where people can be pushed and prodded with this influence tactic. SEME is not so much about bettering people's behavior, but rather getting people to act according to the whim of the interested party or paying client. Essentially, it's a very sophisticated form of subliminal advertising, and everybody should be made aware of it. It wouldn't have hit so close to home for me but I realized after hearing Dr. Epstein describe SEME that it happened to me on the very same day.
The omission of results and memory holing data was easy to spot, but stacking the deck and forcing results outside of the designated sponsored advertisement area is pure evil. It is one thing if you are a magician, and force a card onto someone to perform a magic trick as a form of entertainment. However, it's another thing entirely, to abuse the trust of a nation's population in an attempt to subvert election results the way that Google is doing it.
The image above is brought to you courtesy of Pixabay