In testimony to Congress, research psychiatrist Robert Epstein claimed that big tech companies could have potentially shifted up to 78.2 million votes in the 2018 midterm elections across various races.

Epstein, a Clinton supporter said that by using “ephemeral experiences,” big tech companies like Google “can shift a lot of votes, without people knowing and without leaving a paper trail.”

“We look something up, we get some search results that are generated on the fly, they impact us, and then they disappear,” Epstein explained in an interview with One American News.

“You can’t go back in time and figure out what were people shown.”

These include things like search results, that are “generated on the fly… impact us, and then they disappear,” said Epstein. This makes it impossible to go back into records and “figure out what were people shown,” because their simply aren’t any records to begin with.

The techniques are “essentially subliminal” and have an immense impact:

I have discovered over the years about a dozen different subliminal techniques… that are having a tremendous impact on the thinking and behaviour of more than 2 and a half billion people around the world right now… Even if they’re not doing this deliberately, this is extremely dangerous.”

He told Congress that in the 2018 midterms, these techniques may have been used to shift “upwards of 78.2 million votes to the candidates of one particular party,” and that Google has likely been determining the outcomes of “upwards of 25 percent” of national elections all across the world since 2015.

Epstein said that despite him having “extensive data” proving the existence and effectiveness of these techniques, he was doubtful that Congress would do anything on this crucial issue:

I am just afraid that Congress is just not going to get it together in time to protect us, the American public, from interference in the 2020 election by big tech companies… Those search results in 2020… are going to take people to, for the most part, websites that make Donald Trump’s opponent look a lot better than Donald Trump… We’re talking about 15 million votes that big tech companies can shift in 2020 with no-one knowing.”

Recently, documents were leaked from Project Veritas that demonstrate the internal political biases at Google, revealing that they taught their employees just how to protest President Trump, and put climate sceptics in the same category as “holocaust deniers” in terms of search results.