Google could manipulate elections simply by jiggering with search
ranking. Experiments show that this can influence how people vote.
It would be very difficult to make regulations against this that a
search engine company could not evade. The computation of search
ranking is complex, for good reasons including stopping sites from
gaming the system; this creates many places to hide the manipulation
and many ways to disguise it.
I am not sure what the solution could be.
When I want to check some facts, the first place I look
is Wikipedia. To do a search for articles, then read them,
takes a long time, so I rarely go that way.
It is a shame that the writer endorses the prejudices embodied
by using the word "consume" to refer to reading articles.