HMM: How Google Stopped the Red Wave.

Over a period of months, Google nudged undecided voters toward voting blue by showing people politically biased content in their search engine, suppressing content they didn’t want people to see, recommending left-leaning videos on YouTube (pdf) (which Google owns), allegedly sending tens of millions of emails to people’s spam boxes, and sending go-vote reminders on their home page mainly to liberal and moderate voters.

These manipulations (and others) don’t affect voters with strong points of view, but they can have an enormous impact on voters who are undecided (pdf)—the people who decide the outcomes of close elections.

I know Google did these things (and more!) because, in 2022, my team and I were doing to them exactly what they do to us and our kids 24/7: We were monitoring the politically related content that Google and other tech companies were showing to actual voters—our politically diverse panel of 2,742 “field agents,” who were located mainly in swing states.

Flashback: Could Facebook Swing an Election?

Related: Facebook Worked With FBI to Spy on Americans Who Questioned 2020 Election.