ActRight

By Ron Hosko, President of the Law Enforcement Legal Defense FundFoxNews.com As the first anniversary of the fatal Ferguson, Missouri police encounter approaches, we can expect activists and opportunists to

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) unloaded on Republican presidential rival Donald Trump over the weekend, calling him a "fake conservative" and vowing not to allow him to "destroy" the Tea Party movement that helped bolster the junior senator to national fame. In an opinion piece on IJ Review, Paul...

Donald Trump is like a rampaging high-school student with no adult chaperone around who can take away his Twitter keys.

http://arthurbrooks.aei.org Government keeps growing -- and freedom keeps shrinking -- because we fail to make the moral case for free enterprise. Based on h...

Ted Cruz said that his fundraising online exploded after the Thursday night debate. Cruz went on to say that in just over four months, they've had over 225,000 contributions online with the average...

Wired website has the results of a study by two scientists at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology that shows the algorithm used by Google in its search engine could accidentally determine the outcome of a close presidential race.Specifically, the ranking of negative and positive stories about a particular candidate vastly influences the decision on whom to vote for by individual voters.IMAGINE AN ELECTION—A close one. You’re undecided. So you type the name of one of the candidates into your search engine of choice. (Actually, let’s not be coy here. In most of the world, one search engine dominates; in Europe and North America, it’s Google.) And Google coughs up, in fractions of a second, articles and facts about that candidate. Great! Now you are an informed voter, right? But a study published this week says that the order of those results, the ranking of positive or negative stories on the screen, can have an enormous influence on the way you vote. And if the election is close enough, the effect could be profound enough to change the outcome.In other words: Google’s ranking algorithm for search results could accidentally steal the presidency. “We estimate, based on win margins in national elections around the world,” says Robert Epstein, a psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology and one of the study’s authors, “that Google could determine the outcome of upwards of 25 percent of all national elections.”Epstein’s paper combines a few years’ worth of experiments in which Epstein and his colleague Ronald Robertson gave people access to information about the race for prime minister in Australia in 2010, two years prior, and then let the mock-voters learn about the candidates via a simulated search engine that displayed real articles.One group saw positive articles about one candidate first; the other saw positive articles about the other candidate. (A control group saw a random assortment.) The result: Whichever side people saw the positive results for, they were more likely to vote for—by more than 48 percent. The team calls that number the “vote manipulation power,” or VMP. The effect held—strengthened, even—when the researchers swapped in a single negative story into the number-four and number-three spots. Apparently it made the results seem even more neutral and therefore more trustworthy.Google's algorithm is proprietary, so forget about anyone seeing it to determine the cause of this effect. But it would be interesting to see if one party or the other was usually or always negatively impacted by the ranking of search results.The rankings of positive and negative stories are a by-product of the algorithm -- not the intent of Google managers. But could Google -- or a campaign -- actually game the system to manipulate a desired result?What they call the “search engine manipulation effect,” though, works on undecided voters, swing voters. It’s a method of persuasion.Again, though, it doesn’t require a conspiracy. It’s possible that, as Epstein says, “if executives at Google had decided to study the things we’re studying, they could easily have been flipping elections to their liking with no one having any idea.” But simultaneously more likely and more science-fiction-y is the possibility that this—oh, let’s call it “googlemandering,” why don’t we?—is happening without any human intervention at all. “These numbers are so large that Google executives are irrelevant to the issue,” Epstein says. “If Google’s search algorithm, just through what they call ‘organic processes,’ ends up favoring one candidate over another, that’s enough. In a country like India, that could send millions of votes to one candidate.”Conservatives have been claiming for years that Google has an anti-conservative bias. But in recent years, Google has been contributing to conservative organizations like the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society. Of course, that doesn't mean much, but it raises questions as to whether Google's bias against conservatives and conservative issues translates into a deliberate effort to create an algorithm that would penalize the right when it comes to elections.I don't even know if that's possible. People use Google to search for everything from baby clothes to candidates' positions on issues. Could they actually write a program that would always rank negative stories about conservative candidates first?There's no doubt Google, the company, has a liberal bias. But whether they could -- or would -- consciously use their search engine to advance their agenda can't be proved and would seem to be impossible.

Remy tries to out-Republican the candidates in last night's Fox News debate. Approximately 1:30 minutes. Subscribe to Reason TV's YouTube channel to get auto...

It wasn't all fighting words at Thursday's Republican presidential debate, as Ted Cruz's daughters proved in several sweet moments.

What caused the Civil War? Did the North care about abolishing slavery? Did the South secede because of slavery? Or was it about something else entirely...pe...

Religious tolerance is a given in the West. But it's a historical aberration -- an ideological revolution created by the Puritans and pre-1776 Americans. Wha...

The ‘Great Black Hope’ Who Threw the Fight

GOP presidential hopeful Ted Cruz is building his presidential campaign on fighting the entrenched interests of the Republican leadership in the Senate, and at the RedState Gathering on Saturday, he kicked it up a notch. The colors of their team jerseys may be different, but at the Senate leadership level, Republicans are playing on the …

KUSA – La Plata County and the city of Durango have declared a state of emergency Sunday in wake of a mine waste spill that has turned the Animas

At the RedState Gathering in Atlanta on Saturday, a rapturous crowd embraced U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz's call to look closely at his fellow Republican presidential candidates' records and hold them to their word.

From CNN's New Day

Stefan Molyneux is irritated - a scathing look at the rush to judgment and fervent race-baiting in the Michael Brown shooting case. New evidence and witness ...

Peaceful Protests– Six or so shots in Ferguson! Protesters and media scatter! VIDEO— Shots Fired in #Ferguson one person shot. ...

And to President Clinton, President Abbot said into the camera, I ask that you stop your threats of war and allow the Free States of America to separate in peace, and let our two nations remain brothers instead of enemies. Goodnight, and God bless all Americans.

Thursday night, the first of several Republican primary debates took place in Ohio to an enthusiastic crowd and a record-breaking TV viewing audience. With t...

Today we dive into the first GOP debate and decide who won and who lost the verbal brawls of this debate, as well as look into the problem with Fox news

http://www.RonPaul.com * http://www.RonPaul16.com Last night's GOP debate was more like a reality TV program than a serious look at the issues. So much postu...

A short message from Bishop E.W. Jackson to fellow black Christians about the evil being done by the Democrat party.

Marilyn Pharis was sleeping at her home just before 10 a.m. on July 24 when two men allegedly broke into her home and assaulted her, Santa Maria police said in a news release. CNN's Sara Ganim reports.

David Ray Conley III, 49, was charged with multiple counts of capital murder, in the deaths of six children and ...