The company that runs email infrastructure for the country is also a principal antitrust target of some of the Democratic candidates, makes partisan political donations, and can affect their fundraising in an untraceable way by deciding how to display their campaign email.
This same company was nearly asked to tabulate a primary caucus last week until saner minds prevailed somewhere in the Democratic Party, and the Nevada results were instead reported by phone.
If Google does not already have their thumb on the electoral scale with these kinds of subtle interventions, then they should hire me to do it because it is almost offensive to the craft not to use this power effectively.
The problem is not unique to Google. The same politicians give a fortune to Facebook to run their ads. But Facebook is also an antitrust target and partisan political donor. In some cases, they donated to your opponent! So how exactly do you audit a Facebook ad campaign?
The problem is not just the potential for overt manipulation, but that a spam AI doesn't much like the yellow pixel in Jane Doe's logo and spikes her best fundraising email, tanking her campaign.
Having the top tier of the economy, and most the world's technical infrastructure, run by an oligopoly whose business model is psychological manipulation poses special problems for democracy. The problem is especially acute outside the United States.
Anyway use Pinboard
