Alex Vitale: “What’s needed is something that really asks, why have we so dramatically expanded the role for police, and why are we so heavily targeting poor and minority communities for this kind of intensive and invasive policing?”

I wrote before that Google’s search algorithm didn’t play politics — facts spoke for themselves, and searcher/voter intent determined the results they found. That, unfortunately, is no longer the case. The world’s most popular search engine has announced that a new, experimental feature will give presidential candidates (Republicans and Democrats only) a way to feature their own images, and up to 14,400 characters of their own text, at the top of relevant searches. Similar to how a search for, say, a celebrity will yield a Knowledge Graph above all other organic results (typically a Wikipedia page), featuring images, biographical information, and related links, the idea is to bring voters directly to the candidates they are searching for with real-time updates. These Candidate Cards will not be drawn from other popular search results, as the current Knowledge Graphs are;rather, they will be taken from the candidates themselves.That means they will determine independently what the primary search results for their names look and sound like. It is well documented, researched, and discussed how important social media’s role was in the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections.By making a public search for facts and resources redundant to social media, Google is compromising the future and development of political engagement online. The difference between online search and social media was, until now, the difference between campaigns controlling the message and people electing to engage directly, versus the sum of what is being said both by and about candidates, correlated with how the public at large is receiving these many different narratives and messages.Or put differently, Google is bridging the gap between public relations and public scrutiny, and putting PR on top.