[Trump] was referring to a study by psychologist Robert Epstein, which was discussed on Fox Business earlier on Monday.
But Trump did not describe the research correctly. And the research itself has been called into question.
Epstein himself says Trump was wrong about his findings. Epstein did find "bias" in Google search results, but he says there is no evidence Google "manipulated" the results to favor Clinton. Also, critics of the study note that there is no definitive link between search results and voting behavior in presidential elections.
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Epstein, who testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee in July, found what he alleges was a pro-Clinton bias in Google's search results.
In an interview with CNN on Monday, Epstein said the pro-Clinton bias was "sufficient to have shifted between 2.6 and 10.4 million votes" to Clinton.
There is no basis in Epstein's research for Trump's claim that the alleged bias might have affected "16 million" votes. Epstein did testify in July that big tech companies in general could potentially shift "upwards of 15 million votes" in the 2020 election, but he didn't claim that this happened in 2016.
In the Monday interview, Epstein rejected Trump's claim that Google "manipulated" votes in 2016. He said he does not have firm evidence even that Google intentionally manipulated its search algorithm or results, let alone votes themselves.
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For this study, he had 95 people from 24 states, including 21 self-described undecided voters, conduct election-related searches using search engines Google, Yahoo and Bing. Then he had another group of Americans, hired through the crowdsourcing website Amazon Mechanical Turk, use a point scale to rate the supposed bias of the articles found on the first page of the search results.
An extremely pro-Trump article would get a minus-5, while an extremely pro-Clinton article would get a plus-5.
Using this method, he found that Google's results were reliably more pro-Clinton, in both red states and blue states, than Yahoo or Bing results. Then, using his previous research from elections in other countries about how search results can affect voter intentions, he came to a broad estimate of 2.6 million to 10.4 million votes potentially affected by search bias in the US in 2016.
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Google said Epstein was incorrect in his claims of bias.
"This researcher's inaccurate claim has been debunked since it was made in 2016. As we stated then, we have never re-ranked or altered search results to manipulate political sentiment
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Other academics have joined Google in criticizing Epstein's methodology and conclusions.
One issue is the quality of news sources.
Google says one of its criteria for ranking news results is how authoritative a source is. Using Epstein's methodology, a search engine whose top results page did not feature an article from a far-right pro-Trump website, such as Breitbart, would be ranked as more biased in favor of Clinton than a search engine that did showcase Breitbart.
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Epstein emphasized that he is not a Trump fan. But he argued that Google results should not be treating pro-Trump media as second-class "for whatever reason, whatever your excuse."
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Another issue, other academics say, is that Epstein's study did not establish a link between alleged bias in search results and voter behavior in 2016.
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In other words: Epstein did not test 2016 American voters to see if their Clinton-or-Trump choice had been changed by search results they got. He extrapolated from his previous studies.
In an American presidential election, people tend to know so much about the two leading candidates, and are getting news from so many different sources, that it is not at all clear that search results would affect their preferences the same way they might in other settings where they have less information, said Michael McDonald, a political science professor and elections expert at the University of Florida.
McDonald said it is certainly possible that political results from Google and other search engines have been affected by the unintentional biases of the people who wrote their algorithms. But McDonald said Epstein has failed to establish that any such biases have had anywhere near the magnitude of impact on American presidential voting that Epstein suggests.
Daniel Dale @ CNN
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