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“As long as there’s just one search engine, then competition is irrelevant,” said psychologist Robert Epstein, who co-authored the study on what he calls the search engine manipulation effect. “If that search engine company, for whatever reason, ends up favouring one candidate, there’s no possible correction for that and that influence, it turns out, is virtually invisible.”

The search engine Epstein refers to is, of course, Google. The company vigorously disputes his conclusions. Leslie Church, Google Canada’s head of communications, passed along this response from Amit Singhal, the parent company’s senior vice-president of search: “There is absolutely no truth to Mr. Epstein’s hypothesis that Google could work secretly to influence election outcomes. Google has never re-ranked search results on any topic (including elections) to manipulate user sentiment. “

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Politicians who aren’t adept at using social media to mobilize support, or who keep clear of it for fear of saying the wrong thing or becoming a target of trolls, quickly find that non-participation is not an option. Avoiding the Web is tantamount to staying away from the town square a century ago; and Google, the great leveller, connects us to it all.

“For Canada’s 42nd federal election, it’s no longer sufficient to broadcast to televisions in the living rooms of the nation,” wrote Church, who was communications director for then-Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff, in a piece for the CBC in May. It was a scene-setter to unveil a new, more active role for Google in the current federal campaign, including, for example, co-sponsorship of last Thursday’s debate on the economy, and regular monitoring of and reporting on Canadians’ political search habits.