Thanks for the link, Scooter.
I read through the Epstein 'study.' Wow. (No, no - not that Epstein.) Talk about a sheep in wolf's clothing.
They don't supply the raw data of course: most scientific studies don't, although an increasing number make it available on line. I'd love to be able to look through it. I don't know if it's peer reviewed although that process, which is often cited as the means by which poor science is weeded out, has its problems. (See, for example, the famous 'water memory' paper published by Benveniste in
Nature in 1988. Complete codswallop, never been reproduced, and published by the most influential journal in the world. I mention that because in those days I read
Nature every week as part of my job; and I remember when that issue crossed my desk. I was outraged and wrote to John Maddox, the then editor - they didn't publish my letter but if memory serves they had upwards of 5000 letters from all over the world telling them to knock it off.)
I'm sure the statistics, which claim to measure bias in Google search results favoring either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump, are correctly calculated. They are pretty impressive. I can't of course verify that because I don't have the raw data. Where you can drive a truck through the whole science-like process is the lack of any sort of definition of what constitutes bias or how it is determined. There is no indication of any kind of objective determination procedure. Top pages of Firefox/Google search results were scanned to give 98,044 'election related' web pages which were scanned for bias by 'people recruited from a crowdsourcing website'.
There's a random slice of the population.
The results showed, based on Epstein's methodology, a clear 'bias' towards HRC and against the orange shitface. (Those of you of an analytical bent might notice a lack of objectivity in my assessment of the science here. Sorry, can't help it.) Google of course deny that their algorithms have any inbuilt bias, but of course they don't let us see how they are constructed, citing intellectual property.
I do see a possible mechanism for this effect. The study authors do not; or if they do, they don't mention it. I did a quick Google search (yes, yes, I know) for 'conspiracy theories right wing correlation' and got this
Quora hit. Now I wouldn't normally cite Quora to defend any position I hold, but it's the best I have given the 10 seconds I allocated to the task. The Quora piece led me to this item in
Scooter's hometown newspaper which correlates low intelligence with right wing views. (Note that a correlation is not causation; and even if it is, its by no means one to one. For the record, I believe that there are plenty of high intelligence people with right wing views. Just because you are smart in one area of your life doesn't mean you are right everywhere.) And this piece in
The Big Think site links high education levels with a reluctance to believe in conspiracy theories. Merging these two sets of results, we have at least a suggestion that right wing beliefs make one more susceptible to belief in conspiracies. Anecdotal evidence isn't evidence of course, but thinking of certain people I have come across in my life, I'd say that's generally true.
Here's the mechanism. To see bias where none exists (the null hypothesis) you have to be receptive to conspiracy theories. The world is out to get you. That's regardless of whether the (visible only to you) bias is for HRC or
the OS DJT. I posit that the less educated
tend to be right wing (again: it's not one to one) and right-wingers
tend to be more amenable to belief in conspiracy theories. So those looking for bias will tend to find more against their own beliefs - i.e., left wing bias - where none exists. If they wanted to, the authors of the original study could easily evaluate this effect and correct for it. They don't - and to fail to investigate obvious effects which might skew the data is scientific fraud.
I have not read the studies I cited because they are behind the usual scientific paywall, and not, as far as I can tell, available on SCRIBD like the first one. Based on the abstracts they are far wider (many more subjects by something like a factor of 100) and IMO more valid than the Epstein study.