Controlling the information that we're exposed to is incredibly powerful. If you tweak the results - positively or negatively - it's easy to nudge, influence, and eventually convince people of what you want.

As I've cited often:

> "We predicted that our manipulation would produce a very small effect, if any, but that’s not what we found. On average, we were able to shift the proportion of people favouring any given candidate by more than 20 per cent overall and more than 60 per cent in some demographic groups. Even more disturbing, 99.5 per cent of our participants showed no awareness that they were viewing biased search rankings – in other words, that they were being manipulated."

Ref: https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-internet-flips-elections-and-...