When Google was a child, its young founders embraced a simple code of conduct: Don’t Be Evil. By 2015, when Google became a subsidiary of Alphabet, Inc, the company was already changing. It had become by far the biggest search engine in the world. But more importantly, it had begun to undergo a political transformation that reflected “The Great Awokening” of its young, Ivy League educated workforce. It began to embrace Social Justice.

Not long after its acquisition by Alphabet, CEO Sundar Pichai was pressured by its workforce to sack an employee, James Damore, for saying – on an internal discussion board, after Google solicited feedback – that the Y chromosome probably influences the different occupational choices of men and women. Around the same time, psychologist Robert Epstein began documenting the many ways in which Google could swing elections by altering its search algorithms. More recently, many people have noticed that politically controversial YouTube videos have been de-monetized, de-ranked, or deleted. YouTube is, of course, owned by Google.

Earlier this summer a Google defector gave an interview with Project Veritas, outlining the ways in which Google silences non-progressive employees and uses its search engines to boost “authoritative” sources (not surprisingly, authoritative mostly means progressive). In a remarkable video at Veritas, an executive at Google admits to intentionally manipulating search results for political ends. She even scolds Senator Elizabeth Warren for failing to understand that if Google is broken up, it will be more difficult to control the flow of information in directions that favor progressive political causes. Not surprisingly, the video was immediately deleted from YouTube.

Thoughtful people are beginning to understand that American universities have become secular cathedrals whose main goal, as Jonathan Haidt explains, is to promote social justice rather than truth. But many people fail to understand the downstream effects of this indoctrination on political culture in particular, and our epistemic environment more generally. Employees in the tech companies from which we get our information are mostly young graduates from elite universities whose faculty and staff share a very specific worldview. So it is natural that when they graduate, they try to change the companies they work for to match this worldview. When it is a private company like Gillette, the propaganda they create is merely annoying.

But Google, Twitter, and Facebook are not ordinary private companies. Calls to regulate or re-classify them are not like calls for Gillette to stop lecturing men about how awful we are, or for Coors to make better beer at lower prices. Social media companies and search engines are given a special legal status – they are regulated as platforms rather than publishers – which shields them from certain kinds of lawsuits, but also requires them to refrain from taking sides on politically controversial issues. I don’t have a well-developed view of whether law should divide companies that manage information into platforms or publishers. But it is obvious that our thoughts are heavily influenced by the information we get from internet searches and the arguments we encounter on social media platforms.

Anyone who has taught a university class knows that students tend to cite articles that appear on the first page of Google more than articles that appear later. And like it or not, many people believe that results which appear at the top of the page are more credible than those that come later. But they are wrong.

Google has become a political machine – a publisher that curates content and promotes a carefully crafted worldview through its algorithms, its search rankings, and its decisions to delete user accounts for challenging the dogmas of social justice. Google and YouTube, Twitter and Facebook have vastly more power than any one newspaper or cable news outlet ever enjoyed. While a reasonable argument can be given that Google should be regulated as a natural monopoly, a stronger argument is that Google should be reclassified as a publisher rather than a platform. It should have its special legal protections stripped and its manipulation exposed. If you’re a fan of free markets, you should at least support the rights of the individuals who make voluntary transactions with tech companies to sue them if they publish libelous material or attempt to influence elections by deliberately designing algorithms to shield voters from accessing useful information.

One way to do this is to legally classify them as the publishers they are.