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Amanda Head
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ATLANTA—In their new book, Google and Democracy: Politics and the Power of the Internet, Political Science Professor Sean Richey and alumnus J. Benjamin Taylor provide an in-depth examination of how the Internet search engine company has emerged as a political force.
Until now, the impact of search engines, particularly Google, has not been examined in-depth.
“For 2500 years, the main problem most critics of democracy had with it as a system was that the voters had little knowledge of politics and policy and could not be trusted to make sound judgements,” said Richey. “This all changes with the Internet. Most information is available to almost everyone at any time. The book looks at how well all this information is distributed and how well voters are at processing information online.”
Richey and Taylor conducted a series of experiments to understand the relationship between Google and American politics. One experiment, in particular, explores the popular claim of fake news, analyzing Google’s ability to present voters with well-balanced political information.
The results show that Google users were much more informed about topics compared to randomly-assigned groups that didn't use the Internet to research similar topics.
Richey credits Google’s algorithm.
“It ranks sites with more incoming links higher, and downranks newly created sites with little incoming links,” said Richey. “This leads users to click on suggested URLs that are mainstream because they are at the top of Google search results. And while you can easily find isolated examples of the Internet leading voters astray, on-average over time, searching information on Google will lead most voters to more informed decisions.”
Google and Democracy also dives into the relationship between search engines and social media, highlighting that the two are algorithmically different and should be examined individually.
“Most of what people find negative about the Internet actually derives from social media,” said Richey. “Social media provides information by grouping together similar people. Searching for information online has little of the negatives of social media because its algorithmic basis for information provision is not focused on creating like-minded groups. To gain better information, our suggestion to readers is to use social media less and information searches more.”
To order a copy of Google and Democracy: Politics and the Power of the Internet, please click here.
Featured Researcher
Sean Richey
Associate Professor
Political Science