It just hit me that if I want to get an accurate view of what people think of a contentious topic, I can't trust Google or Youtube as a gateway anymore. I simply don't know what machines or "experts" have decided to hide from me.
You never could: any "consensus" you see, the media consensus, the Google search consensus, the Facebook consensus, the Youtube consensus, the consensus of people on the street in your hometown, all have their own biases (social, technological and statistical even if you can escape the political) and they always had. The best you can hope for is to be aware of them.
It's not about consensus, it's about verifiability. When the president justifies policy because group X believes Y, I could theoretically fact-check what X actually says -- we unfortunately live in a post-truth world where that's a necessary check on democracy. I can't do that if Google has decided X is too unpleasant to be heard.