American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology :
It has come to light in recent years that emerging internet-based technologies have made possible new means of manipulating human opinions, beliefs, and behavior on a massive scale, often without people’s knowledge. Randomized, controlled research conducted in multiple countries by AIBRT researchers has shown, for example, that search rankings favoring one political candidate can rapidly shift the voting preferences of undecided voters toward that candidate by up to 80 percent in some demographic groups. New research shows that opinions can also be shifted by manipulating search suggestions (“autocomplete”), and multiple concerns have been raised in recent months about how social media might have shifted large blocks of votes in the 2016 US presidential election by filtering news feeds, personalizing content, spreading fake news stories and other means.