ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on Google and Internet politics. It lays out our theory for Google's impact on direct democracy knowledge acquisition, and examines how our expectations fit within the larger literature on Internet politics. Thinking back to the Lippmann-Dewey debate, we can see that the Internet represents something like the pinnacle of information-driven society. The Internet has become an important place for American citizens to engage in politics. For social media, Facebook activity is generally associated with increased offline political activity. Online activity includes commenting on blogs, using micro-blogs and social media, as well as using Internet search engines to access more content and information. The chapter examines the possible political impacts of the most used tool for information gathering, Google. The computer science behind Google's search algorithm suggests the search engine does some of the tasks we expect of good editors. The Google Search algorithm is proprietary.
