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.