It is scary how much power and influence Google now have in setting the agenda for public discourse. When this opens up to other "prominent figures and organizations", it will be at Google's discretion who is worthy of the public's attention and which issues and areas will get this treatment.
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.
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.
Does Google win by suppressing speech, even if those voices counter Google's ambitions? Google would do itself a disservice by cutting out people who rail against Google specifically or against what Google stands for generally.
Google's bottom line is dependant on capturing 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.
There's a behavioural difference here. If I don't see someone speak on a TV channel, then I don't assume they don't exist / aren't important. If I search for someone via Google / other search engine, and they don't come up, or their opponents come up far higher in the rankings than they do, then I imagine (without having done any proper studies on this) that it will influence my opinion of them more.
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!
There are not thousands of television channels in the US that will broadcast political content such that presidential candidates can push their message across them.
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.
More importantly those 150-200 channels or few dozen political content channels are owned by a VERY small number of very large corporations. Five or so.
>Terrifying? I assume you're living in a constant state of fear then, because television networks already have and use that power.
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.
That would be of concern (regarding elections), if the system wasn't a rigged, 2-party system for a century or so -- where there are strict conventions of who gets to be heard and who can run (including needing some millions of the campaign), with BS primaries, and party nominations and such.
Isn't this much the same as the apparent rumours of twitter suppressing conservative voices and hashtags? I've not looked into it in enough detail to decide whether its simply a conspiracy, but many popular internet services could be used to push political agendas.
Twitter likely did censor the #WhichHillary hashtag from two weeks ago. One of its executives was holding a fundraiser for Hillary Clinton a few days later.
Even if Google was 100% unbiased politically, providing yet another major outlet for people who have no problem getting their message out already seems redundant, unless the point is just to reinforce existing power and influence.
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.
> (...) giving a platform to alternative/marginal/dissident figures or organizations, from any part of the political spectrum, would at least have some point and be a lot more interesting.
Sounds like a possible startup if there's a way to generate revenue from such a platform.
Same thing with AMP "partnerships", which get shown at the top of a search with images and whatnot. Except those partnerships are mostly establishment corporate media.
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.
> This seems a step beyond simply organising the world’s information.
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.
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."
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.
Maybe on paper, but the FEC makes it easy to get on that list without any proof of identity. There are tons of joke candidates, like Crawfish Crawfish.
It could be that this is massive, and has little or nothing to do with the US presidential election. They're going to try to force their way into social by grafting social media posts onto the one thing basically everyone uses - the search page.
Or it could be a desire to provide maximally relevant search results. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, Dr. Freud.
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.
This doesn't seem like such a bad idea. I don't care about most of the stuff on Twitter. But, if I'm searching for something and a Tweet-like "post" exists that is relevant to what I'm searching for, I might like that.
This is the Google version of Twitter's little 'verified' checkmarks, just for whole web pages instead of tweets. The presidential election is actually a great place to roll out that kind of service given him much domain squatting goes on (e.g. http://www.tedcruz.com), but it's clearly of general applicability. If it takes off, it makes Google the place to go to for establishing a page as the 'official' version.
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"
Whoa, I've never seen this privacy reminder box before! Must be an EU-specific thing to try and dissuade them from getting skinned alive by EU privacy laws.
I'm thrilled to report that uBlock Origin completely strips out this spam on the search results page. I was worried that it might take some time to filter out this noise from the search results page, but apparently not!
No content is hidden from my side[1] -- I am using default filter lists. Poster must have some custom filters, or using some other 3rd-party filter list which causes this. The logger would tell why content is blocked on his side.
I think part of it is due to the fact that Google has greater access to a broader audience. Not everyone will search Twitter for "Donald Trump" but they will certainly search Google - so Google is providing a way for the candidates to take advantage of what is already happening probably millions of times every day.
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...
Yeah, the inability to search your Twitter feed is simply infuriating. This is an embarrassingly parallel problem, so the issue isn't scale slowing the development of Search down. Twitter just doesn't give a shit.
This is a bit of a snide remark on my part, but maybe the fact that that Dorsey is trying to run two separate companies at the same time may explain some of Twitters aimlessness.
What exactly do you wish Twitter had done? Allow longer posts? That's not going to have the big positive impact some people think it will. Hosting longer posts on Twitter isn't going to bring more users to Twitter or keep more people more engaged with it.
This is a big deal because Google is leveraging their dominant position in search to coerce people into using it as a social platform.
I do find it amusing that all comments are focused on the US. There are hundreds of countries around the world were TV stations are black boxes and presidential / prime ministerial hopefuls have no platform to express themselves. Having access to a platform that can promote and answer content as users are searching for answers on them (at least how it reads on face value) seems incredibly important. I do however agree that transparency around who gets access to the platform is critical for user trust.
This seems like a bad idea in that it allows the powerful to completely control the messages that are affiliated with them. Suppose celebrity x does wrong to a regular citizen, and they have Google posts at their disposal while Jane Smith does not.
On the other hand, this seems like something Rick Santorum might have been grateful for.
I can imagine the popular, rich and powerful to love it. Imagine avoiding all the abuse, threats, snide remarks, witty rebuttals, imaginative memes and uncomfortable truths that Twitter gives them as a platform. People want something more sanitized as a platform. It's quite an interesting development.
Could be an interesting way for candidates to get in front of third-party spin. When you Google "Bernie Sanders" you could be greeted with rich content from the Sanders campaign explaining his positions, rather than links to hit pieces and other info-detritus.
Of course, either way you're getting somebody's propaganda.
My concern is then the composition of the rich content when Google offers itself as the platform. "Welcome, to our podium, Canditate A. We've already constructed the stage and backdrop, too, with these accompanying articles, images, and layout."
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?
Wow, when Google makes this available to businesses they're going to be able to charge whatever they want and every business is going to have to use it. This is not good.
Is that so different than the advertising space that they currently sell? Everyone that has posted screenshots of the new feature is using ad-blocking, so maybe we just don't even think about the ads any more?
Google already does something a little like this with Google plus pages. Let's say someone google's for my website name, and I have a Google plus page associated with it. If I have recently posted new content on my Google plus page, this post is displayed in the top right hand side of the Google search results.
I wonder if these new posts will appear in the same place or actually embedded in the main results.
Is Google building a version of Facebook news feed in Google Now?! For many people Facebook is for getting updates from their news source and use less social material
While there would be a lot of fear of Google interfering with public discourse, it is key to point out that there are over 1,600 presidential candidates. How many of them do you even recognize? How does the country know that there isn't another great president who just didn't make enough to have public impact?
This can actually decouple correlations between spending and winning. Maybe then we would have a government by the people, not by the big corp.
This seems like a terrible idea. If given access you can now completely control the primary message regarding search terms of yourself. Kinda defeats the purpose of using search as discovery, no?
without the opposing views, trolls, abuse, other points of view, memes, snide remarks, outrage, support and morsels of truth and without a Safety Council, perhaps, yes like Twitter.
If they could build a social network, I would probably enjoy it being part of search. Show me links people I follow have tweeted that are related... seems like that would be a killer app.
Yeah seriously, they keep putting out these products that no one ever wants to use. Like that Google Maps thing or that Chrome browser or whatever. Geez.
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.