One anti-Google researcher declared the tech giant cost Kari Lake an election win in 2022
CAITLIN SIEVERS
Arizona Mirror
Kari Lake told the small crowd gathered in a Arizona House of Representative meeting room on Monday that Google has “more power than any entity in the world when it comes to choosing our leaders here in America,” just before state Rep. Alexander Kolodin declared that he sees modern America as a “nascent totalitarian society.”
Lake, the failed 2022 Republican candidate for Arizona governor, and Kolodin, a freshman Republican state legislator from Scottsdale, were both highly critical of Big Tech’s influence on free speech and elections during the first meeting of the Arizona House of Representatives’ Committee on Oversight, Accountability and Big Tech.
During that meeting, Robert Epstein, a psychology researcher and longtime prominent Google critic who has been studying the search engine’s results and their influence on elections for about a decade, warned that the tech giant was already influencing elections in the United States by directing undecided voters toward particular candidates.
“If you took Google out of that picture, Kari Lake would have won,” Epstein said.
