Remember a couple of months ago people were all excited about Dr. Robert Epstein claiming Google preventing Trump-related searches or banning Trump ads was going to throw the election to the Democrats and Joe Biden?
I certainly do, because at the time Dr. Epstein went public with his predictions about the forthcoming 2020 election, my Twitter account blew up from people bringing it to my attention.
Dr. Epstein is a prominent American psychologist and author. He was formerly editor-in-chief of Psychology Today magazine and a distinguished professor at the University of California – San Diego.
Epstein has been involved in controversies and criticisms of Google and other Big Tech platforms since 2012 when Google began placing security warnings on links to his website, which reduced his site traffic.
In 2015 Dr. Epstein garnered significant media attention with the claim that Google and other social media platforms could ‘rig the 2016 election’ through search engine manipulation.
Despite these claims, and the fact that it’s an undisputed certainty that the Big Tech platforms vastly preferred Hillary Clinton to Donald Trump, Trump won the 2016 election and became President of the United States.
Nevertheless, Dr. Epstein is now back and is once again sounding the alarm about Google, Facebook, Twitter, and other tech platforms throwing the election to Joe Biden and the Democratic Party.
Breitbart News posted a report entitled “Dr. Robert Epstein: Google Will Shift 10% of Voters to Make Trump a ‘Blip in History’”. In that report, Dr. Epstein stated:
“One of the things that was said there by one of their top executives is ‘we’re going to use every means at our disposal, all of Google’s power to make sure Trump isn’t re-elected’ so if they’re using every single means at their disposal, then they’re using all of the techniques that I’ve discovered and probably more that I haven’t discovered yet. That’s enough to shift roughly ten percent of the voting population of the United States with no one knowing they’re being manipulated and no paper trail for authorities to trace.”
In a guest column published at The Epoch Times back in February, entitled “Why Republicans Can’t Win In 2020”, Dr. Epstein began by saying:
“When it comes to election manipulation, left-leaning American technology companies make the Russians look like rank amateurs. No matter which weak candidate the Democrats ultimately nominate, and even with Russia’s help, President Donald Trump can’t win the 2020 election. For that matter, in races nationwide in which the projected winning margins are small—say, under 5 percent or so—Republicans, in general, are likely to lose.”
Well, I disagree with the distinguished doctor, and I’ll explain why.
Social media’s Big Tech platforms try their darnedest to influence elections, but I don’t think it's correct to proclaim with absolute certainty that Big Tech has enough power to determine the outcome of an election before it takes place. Especially when the dynamics in place from one election to another can be vastly different.
The Big Weakness of Social Media Myopia
As I just pointed out, Epstein was claiming in 2015 that Big Tech “could” rig the 2016 election. Whatever deliberate efforts social media platforms took to throw the vote to Hillary and Democrats, 2016 was a victory for Trump and the GOP.
And this time, Dr. Epstein is proclaiming with what seems to be the absolute certainty that there is simply no path to victory for Trump & the GOP in 2020 due to social media manipulation.
One of the biggest weaknesses of people who spend all their time immersed in and studying social media is that they can become unduly impressed with the power of social media to shape real-world events. In my opinion, this is what has happened to Dr. Epstein and the Google executives who boasted about their amazing powers to influence the public. Epstein took them at their word. I myself do not.
Surprisingly enough, the people most loudly boasting about the incredible power of social media to influence the real world are...people who make their living in and around social media companies. Go figure.
While it’s understood that most Americans have figured out the deceptive practices and manipulative schemes of the mainstream media, this narrative gets floated that even today the American public is a lost babe in the woods when it comes to Big Tech social media platforms lying to them and attempting to manipulate them.
The claim goes that the public is well aware of the first but remains somehow completely blind to the second. Let me explain why I doubt this claim.
How Can Sneaky Social Media Manipulation Occur If There’s A Very Loud On-going National Conversation About It?
Allow me to point out that there’s been a very loud and obvious national conversation going on for more than a few years at this point on THIS EXACT SUBJECT of social media manipulation.
It is a conversation to which Dr. Epstein has indeed made several very valuable contributions. While the professor has done a great job pulling back the curtain and giving the public a good long look at Big Tech shenanigans when it comes to attempts at manipulating elections and public opinion, the glaring hole in his argument is this:
How can Big Tech Social Media Companies successfully manipulate the public into voting for Joe Biden and Democrats when there is such an ongoing and intense national debate on this very subject?
It’s not just President Trump himself repeatedly calling attention to social media platforms that engage in blatant censorship and attempted manipulation of their users. Members of Congress have also often raised the issue’s visibility.
Major media outlets – willingly or not – have had to publish story after story detailing the blatant censorship actions of Big Tech.
As just one example: Just recently Twitter began censoring some of President Trump’s tweets, along with Donald Trump Jr.’s and others over promoting videos showing front-line doctors pushing back on the rampant disinformation being spread about the drug Hydroxychloroquine.
The only thing these ham-handed attempts at manipulation accomplished was to provide a clear demonstration of “The Streisand Effect”. Instead of burying the offending information, the attempt at censorship caused millions of people to learn about it.
How can Big Tech successfully manipulate public opinion if much of the public is wise to the fact of social media platforms attempting to manipulate them?
Instead of dying down, the national conversation about social media censorship is only growing stronger the closer the 2020 election gets.
That brings me to my next point:
The Election Dynamics of 2020 Are Far Different From 2016
It should be realized the dynamics of the approaching 2020 election are NOTHING like the election of four years ago in 2016.
Back in 2016, the Democratic Party had two big advantages it has now lost:
1) The Democrats were mostly sane in their policy platform, still appearing to be a mainstream American political party.
2) The Democrats were running a very strong-looking candidate in Hillary Clinton – who did win the popular vote total.
They do not have either of these advantages this time out because:
1) The Democratic Party’s platform for this election is, to be blunt, insane. Abolishing bail, emptying the prisons, erasing the borders, dissolving immigration agencies such as ICE, defunding/disbanding police departments, Green New Deal boondoggles and more.
2) The Democratic Party has been reduced to running a candidate with cognitive issues whose public appearances must be tightly scripted and controlled who has been a DC insider since the year that former President Nixon went to China – 1972.
Big Tech censoring conservatives online and manipulating search engines won’t matter in the end for the simple reason that in this present election, Trump's best advertisement has nothing to do with GOOGLE anyway. It's THESE LUNATICS and what their own citizens have been watching them do to them and their families and their businesses for the past eight months.
As just one example of the lunacy: On July 31, the Seattle city council voted to disband the city’s **entire police department** and replace it with the civilian-led "Department of Community Safety & Violence Prevention."
Fantastic job there, Seattle voters!
It is the Democratic Party leadership’s own constant lunacy, tyrannical impulses, and hysteria that is going to get Donald Trump re-elected this November. Social media not only cannot HIDE the lunacy but also can’t stop it.
The irony of this is that its BIDEN that has “Return To Normalcy” as his campaign theme. It is becoming increasingly apparent with more than 90 days to go to the election that a Biden victory would lead to anything but normalcy.
Social Media Isn’t The Real World That Trapped Blue State Voters Are Living In Right Now
Democrats are boldly promising to unleash absolute cultural chaos on the country if they win this November.
To hear Democrats tell it, it is far past time for America’s systemically racist cultural heritage to be uprooted, destroyed, and replaced with something ‘better’ than what America’s founders bequeathed by...these people.
Let me just go on the record right here and state I strongly doubt today’s modern Democratic Party is going to pull off this radical transformation of the American founding that they are babbling about. 
Millions of people living in these deep blue areas have been having it slowly dawn on them for the past eight months that actual Marxist revolutionaries and babbling lunatics are in power over them. And they know what they need to do to fix this crisis.
Google doing funky things with internet search engines, Facebook and YouTube suppressing video content, and Twitter censoring Conservative accounts does not change any of this.
And that’s why Trump wins the 2020 election in a landslide.
Brian Cates entered the political arena in March 2012, following the death of Andrew Breitbart. He is currently a political columnist for The Epoch Times and UncoverDC. Brian is based in South Texas and is the author of: “Nobody Asked For My Opinion … But Here It Is Anyway!”
Twitter: @drawandstrike
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