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This seems a step beyond simply organising the world’s information. Even if it's with the best intentions, the fact is that they will have a significantly influence on the discourse itself.
On the contrary I'd say that in this field the more players there are, the better.
The average American household has access to just 150-200 TV channels, total. Most of those would never carry anything related to the election. The vast majority of those are specific content carriers: movies, music, on-demand, sports. You're down to having a few dozens channels (ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX, CNBC, MSNBC, local affiliates etc) that a candidate can push through.
There are 2,200x tv stations in the US. Most of those are small, local stations with zero national or regional reach.
There are thousands of online sites and platforms that at least have as large of an audience as those stations. All of those sites can be reached by almost anyone in the US, which is not true of the local TV stations.
Further, there is nothing even remotely like: Reddit, Twitter, Wordpress, Tumblr, Facebook, et al. in the television realm, where just about anyone can reach a national audience if their message resonates (and do so for free). There is also nothing like the app options that are available online, whether Snapchat, Instagram, or voter reach apps like NationBuilder.
The web is vastly more open and representative.
Not everywhere else.
Why do we have to make most of the western world worse, just because the result is better than what currently exists in the US?
First, there are lots of tv networks.
Second, yes, regarding that matter, we SHOULD fear the power of tv networks.
I don't even understand the reasoning here: "why do you call Google having curation/censorship power fearsome, since tv networks already have curation/censorship power?".
Obviously because curation/censorship power of a level and above (e.g. not your local high school paper) is troubling.
Instead of seeing Google as rising as a new kind of ruler, enforcing a new kind of authority, I think it's more appropriate to see it as grafting itself onto an already existing authority.
So to me it's not clear cut whether the centralizing power Google brings with its resources overweights the decentralizing power from dividing such authority into more parts.
And as an aside it also seems foolish to worry about this when said political system itself guarantees that the majority of the population can't be properly represented unless they agree with each other, which is precisely the problem media control solves.
I also don't buy the argument that Google having huge powers of, effectively, no-platforming is any less terrifying because TV channels have had it for a long time. This is just as bad!
I don't expect them to promote any old blogger with an opinion (though I'd even prefer that to this), but giving a platform to marginal/dissident figures or organizations, from any part of the political spectrum, would at least serve some kind of interesting or useful purpose.
Sounds like a possible startup if there's a way to generate revenue from such a platform.
Google's bottom line is dependant on capturing all the data.
But not on displaying all the data.
In fact, their whole business is to only show the data they believe you need right now.
EDIT: Which makes it even easier to just "drop" controversial views that might challenge your opinion – the Filter Bubble effect is very real, and with every change that makes search more "relevant", it gets worse.
EDIT2: If, additionally, a malicious entity – say, a government agency – would force Google to censor a topic, it would become a lot more problematic.
It is just the contrary since very few can post there. Then, if they prioritize these people/services on their search above others it turns the navigation path to a place owned by Google.
This is no doubt the outcry they are hoping for, with the intent being to open it up fully to everyone qualified to be a Twitter user. The exclusivity is just to build hype and cachet for PR purposes.
So just as we thought we'd escape from the brainwashing of corporate media from TV thanks to the Internet, I think Google, Facebook and Twitter even will play a big role on keeping the masses brainwashed by serving corporate media content to the majority of people, keeping them as brainwashed as ever.
http://www.fec.gov/data/Form2Filer.do?format=html
On another note, I wonder if this has anything to do with Medium who has been positioning itself in Washington and C-suites as the "default place for people to go when they have ideas of consequence."
http://www.politico.com/story/2016/01/how-medium-is-breaking...
Why haven't heard of these guys before?
Does this happen every year?
For that matter, read your ballot carefully. There's more than just Republican and Democrat that make it to the final ballot. If nothing else you can pick up some terms to Google and learn about. Mostly for your intellectual curiosity, since generally the other parties manage to pick up little more than low-dozens of County Dogcatcher-level positions per election in the entire nation.
Not-a-disclaimer: I'm spending the year at Google (as a visiting scientist; I don't own stock and have no financial interest in its success). You might be surprised by how strong the desire is to do the right thing by users and make it easy for them to find what they're looking for. There's not always an ulterior motive -- happy searchers made Google what it is today.
1600 Mystic John Ray, later repurposed by Karl Marx.
This is just a new ad unit.
Wasn't that the strategy with Google Plus when it came out?
https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=hillary+issues
https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=bernie+issues
I'm referring to the postings with the photo and the checkmark and the "On Google" text, not the ones pulled from news sources, like the ones for "trump issues"
Screen cap from mobile: http://i.imgur.com/X1M5YZn.jpg
I'd argue further that Twitter has done close to nothing to make their search a useful feature in the first place, which is why people aren't searching Twitter with "Donald Trump". If I was Twitter, this would be very worrying. All they've managed to do so far is "firehose search", which is only useful for realtime events unfolding. They probably should have been thinking about "topic search" and "person search" for a while now...
FTFY
This is a big deal because Google is leveraging their dominant position in search to coerce people into using it as a social platform.
On the other hand, this seems like something Rick Santorum might have been grateful for.
Of course, either way you're getting somebody's propaganda.
It sounds, initially, like Google's role is very passive, but I think control over what surrounds the podium has the potential to be very active. "Hey, Candidate B has better lighting!"
Google as active medium becomes the active message? Thoughts?
"As a presidential candidate I want a platform that every one of my constituents can use to follow my ramblings..."
I wonder if these new posts will appear in the same place or actually embedded in the main results.
(Found via a Google search sadly enough.)
Why is this necessary if Google Plus already exists? Couldn't they just add the features to Google Plus and include them in the search results?
This can actually decouple correlations between spending and winning. Maybe then we would have a government by the people, not by the big corp.
So yes, like Twitter. ..if you only use it to share Medium posts.
Except no, they don't.
Thanks, Google, but I need more space, not less, from this madness