"I'm sure almost 100% of Google employees would never support such a thing..."

Even to stop Trump? I'm betting quite a few employees, especially at the top, wouldn't mind tweaking things to stop what they see as a very real threat.

I think they'll do it, but not because they see Trump as a threat. They'll do it to prevent "hate speech". Websites that criticize Trump will be signal-boosted, and those that criticize Sanders or Clinton will be suppressed for using "hate speech" and for being "conspiracy nuts", even if their tone is identical to that of Trump's critics.

For the record, I don't care which of these contestants wins. I don't even care about media biases, because I think it's only natural. But I am disappointed when tech companies like Google, Facebook, and Twitter, that are not content creators, but are supposed to be just pipelines for content, exhibit clear biases.

For this particular issue, some people suggest a more benign explanation for the bias[1], and they might be right. But I still suspect some manual tweaking to boost some sites, and suppress others.

[1] http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2015/1...

Trump's pretty bad IMO, but worst case scenario he'd only be the president. There's really good checks against the president's power. The unfortunate (glaring) exception being that we've somehow lost track of the bit about Congress being the only one who can execute a declaration of war.

A lot of those "checks" are just things that Presidents historically don't do, not that they're prohibited from doing so by the Constitution. Even then, it's not clear that Trump really gives a shit about the Constitution. Like all contemporary Presidents he would decide what he wants to do first and then have his lawyers provide some veneer of constitutionality to it, but in Trump's case the bar for such would probably be really, really low.

He's already mentioned going after news outlets that criticize him. What else can the President do? Can he instruct the military/NSA to spy on every sitting Congressman and Senator, and blackmail them? That's not explicitly unconstitutional, and these days "explicitly unconstitutional" seems to be the only thing that matters (i.e. unless the Constitution actually says you can't do a thing, then you can do that thing). What are the President's actual powers during a time of war, especially if the theater is in America itself? Can he mobilize the military in response to a domestic terrorist attack, and if so what sort of plenary power does he have domestically?

And the more important question, really, is not "what does the Constitution say" but rather "what are the American people ready for"? If Trump does become President, the answer would seem to be "quite a lot of really scary shit".

Why is Donald Trump "a very real threat"? To who? Maybe it's Google who are the true threat to democracy?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/aei-world-forum-donald-t...

"Billionaires, tech CEOs and top members of the Republican establishment flew to a private island resort off the coast of Georgia this weekend for the American Enterprise Institute’s annual World Forum, according to sources familiar with the secretive gathering.

The main topic at the closed-to-the-press confab? How to stop Republican front-runner Donald Trump.

Apple CEO Tim Cook, Google co-founder Larry Page, Napster creator and Facebook investor Sean Parker, and Tesla Motors and SpaceX honcho Elon Musk all attended. So did Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), political guru Karl Rove, House Speaker Paul Ryan, GOP Sens. Tom Cotton (Ark.), Cory Gardner (Colo.), Tim Scott (S.C.), Rob Portman (Ohio) and Ben Sasse (Neb.), who recently made news by saying he “cannot support Donald Trump.”

The fact that establishment figures from both sides see him as "a very real threat" seems like a very good sign. For all the talk of democracy, it's pretty funny (funny ironic) listening to all the talk of subverting the election process. Can't entrust such a thing with the plebes after all...

Over half the plebes are opposed to Trump too. This is not a class divide.

This kind of thing isn't new though. The Internet is just the latest means of communication with the public. Public opinion has, and still is, manipulated for good and bad via mass media, grassroots campaigning, bribery, agent provocateurs, etc., etc. Replace "internet" with "telephone" or "printing press" and your post would read the same. Governments always want to control their "internal political processes" and to achieve that they tend to block out anything that interferes, whether it be foreign governments or internal factions that run counter to their interests.

> is he wrong when he is accusing foreign powers from trying to incite demonstrations or manipulate public opinion? I'm pretty sure he is not.

Please substantiate. Turkey is a NATO member which, other than the recent kerfuffle with downing a Russia fighter jet, has decent relations with most of its neighbours, and no real Great Enemies. Turkey has always had a press-repressive (!!) orientation because they've wanted to keep internal Islamist forces at bay. Amusing, Erdogan has flipped the script and now it's his Islamist government which is cracking down on other voices, although the take-over of the Zaman news organization is really about internal fighting with an influential cleric. But either way, in the end, Turkey has always had authoritarian governments succeeded by military coups and more authoritarian rule.

> Turkey is a NATO member

Turkey's membership of NATO was only achieved through explicit naming in an addendum to the Articles, the only country so included, and was never a popular addition. They remain the only country for which expulsion has a clear process, though unlikely.

> has decent relations with most of its neighbours

Except with Greece, both of whom have shot down more of each others aircraft than non-NATO aircraft, and Armenia with whom they have a lingering border skirmish and Syria and Kurdistan-Iraq...

Don't forget the Bulgaria, Cyprus, Iran, Syria, Russia and the Kurds.

Turkey is basically surrounded by enemies, there's almost no one they are on good terms with.

That would be regrettable, but it only partially addresses the threat that the Internet, or rather networking in general, poses to oppressive regimes around the world (which is to say, the vast majority of governments around the world). A balkanization of the Internet would reduce that threat considerably, and especially with regard to outside influences of course, but would not come close to eliminating it.

The threat I'm talking about is just people talking to each other, and coordinating their actions. The only way to totally stop that is to basically ban computing devices at all, or at least ban their networking Battlestar Galactica style, and at that point you're condemning yourself to a 70s-ish economy in the best case, which means you're not going to compete with other nations in trade nor in military strength. Kind of defeats the purpose of having an oppressive regime in the first place, which is mainly about controlling and enslaving your people while playing at "realpolitik" pissing contests on the international stage.

I look at the Internet as basically a return to the status quo, after a century where national governments could monopolize the mass media and thus monopolize speech. Those days are over, and not even a balkanization of the Internet will bring them back. Oppressive regimes increasingly will have to choose between going full DPRK, or trying their hand on a more even playing field (compared to 50 years ago). So far they have unanimously chosen the latter, and there is every reason to think they will continue to do so.

>For one Google could influence the US presidential elections by skewing search results and making certain candidates look bad and others good.

It'd be very hard to prove, but yes. This could be extremely granularly controlled, too-- apply a few filters to weed out those who are likely to be able to detect subversion, then drill down to the demographic in the geographical area that needs to be energized to vote for a certain candidate.

Or they could display a bar chart of "won" primary delegates, merging in the counts for superdelegates who haven't committed their votes yet.

> many island solutions with firewalls

I wonder if it will be less pernicious than this.

> Same goes for China, Russia ... great firewall.

I don't know about Russia but it certainly seems that China is establishing some social networks that are wholly distinct from other western ones. In that way they're "island solutions" but less malicious sounding.

I don't think restricting the flow of information because you don't trust people to interpret it correctly is morally okay. People have been influenced by other people since the dawn of language. Deciding by whom they can be influenced shouldn't be the state's concern.

Why the downvotes? Are people really advocating for state censorship and propagandization? Perhaps the state has already achieved it's goals if this is so.