by Karl Denninger, Market Ticker:

How do you fix this?

Search rankings have this powerful effect on votes for the same reason that they have one on consumer behaviour: the higher the ranking, the more people believe and trust the content, mistakenly assuming that some impartial and omniscient genie has carefully evaluated each Web page and put the best ones first. (Not so.)

Epstein’s team then tried the same technique on 2,000 actual voters in India’s recent presidential election.

“That’s right, we deliberately manipulated the voting preferences of more than 2,000 real voters in the largest democratic election in the history of the world,” he writes, “easily pushing the preferences of undecided voters by more than 12% in any direction we chose – double that amount in some demographic groups.”

He estimates that this kind of tampering could be decisive in any election within a 2.9% margin.

How do you prevent this?

I’m not sure you can when there is any sort of material monopoly in these sites.

Does that mean that Google has to be broken up and search engines and other sites — like Facebook — prevented by law from accumulating majority market power — say much less anything like what they have now?

It might.

I’m having a lot of trouble coming up with a lesser remedy that would be functional.  You can’t just prohibit banhammering people, for example, since the “arms race” sort of crowding out still remains. How do you audit the decisions of the systems or people involved?  What do you do when Facebook is full of hard-left employees to the point that people on the other side of the aisle are marginalized and harassed — and the company fails to stop it?  What do you do when Google fires someone who has the temerity to simply question said political monoculture and this is ruled not unlawful?  In other words it’s perfectly ok to have such a monoculture in a company that faces the public and decides what you can see and distribute as a user of their “service.”

That, standing alone, is ok.  Where the line gets crosses is when that firm has market power, as now you have an anti-trust problem in a business context and a tyranny problem in a political context.

The latter is why 1776 happened.

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