People are weapons.

Maybe not Apple because they don't have a social network but Google (along with Facebook/Reddit/TikTok/...) can absolutely shape public opinion by controlling which posts/videos/discussions/comments get shown to people.

YouTube has this thing where your comments appear to be part of the discussion but actually don't appear to other people until much later. This means they are not _technically_ removing your comment, they just make sure nobody sees it during the time period where 90% of the views come from.

Look at how people censor themselves with words like "unalive" or "grape" because, presumably, certain topics are not advertiser friendly. But nobody can really confirm how and which words affect the algorithm. It's all just guesswork. They could just as easily promote or censor political topics and nobody would know.

It's not hard to turn people into extremists by consistently showing them one side of the story.