For the election, politics is 100% advertisement. Candidates have no legal obligation to keep their promises (and that's a good thing). An election won by something that isn't advertisement is not democratic.
Now for the 2016 presidential election specifically, the fact that Trump won despite having most of the Silicon Valley and a major part of the online world against him shows that "Google and others" are not that powerful compared to the traditional players.
A fraction of a fraction of the 2 billion dollars the Hillary camp spent trying to manipulate the election.
CA is the Clinton camp's boogeyman, much as Correct the Record was for Sanders fans and George Soros is for Trump supporters.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2017/08/...
>A December report from Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy delivered some sobering news for all those investigative reporters who may have supposed that their Trump exclusives were changing the world: None of them were breaking from the pack. “Clinton’s controversies got more attention than Trump’s (19 percent versus 15 percent) and were more focused,” noted study author Thomas E. Patterson. “Trump wallowed in a cascade of separate controversies. Clinton’s badgering had a laser-like focus. She was alleged to be scandal-prone. Clinton’s alleged scandals accounted for 16 percent of her coverage—four times the amount of press attention paid to Trump’s treatment of women and sixteen times the amount of news coverage given to Clinton’s most heavily covered policy position.”
https://shorensteincenter.org/news-coverage-2016-general-ele...
It notes that:
> Trump’s coverage during the general election was more negative than Clinton’s
Positive coverage of Trump was during the primaries, which is what the Clinton camp wanted, calling him a Pied Piper:
> We need to be elevating the Pied Piper candidates so that they are leaders of the pack and tell the press to [take] them seriously.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/11/hillary-clin...
Make no mistake, the media recognized very quickly that Trump drew viewers. There’s a damn good reason why CNN is posting record profits.
Seems to be true in this case. They covered Trump, which made him the person people think about.
They told people to hate Trump. The electorate didn't listen.
Back to the original question, does that mean we're easily manipulated?
On the original question: evidence seems to say yes.
Heck, very very few advertising campaigns involve telling the user to buy a product or service. Most focus more on creating a new need/want, or in repeated exposure to make the advertised good seem “normal”.
Now the tricky thing is that manipulation requires intent, which is very hard to prove. Hanlon’s razor would have us believing that in most cases, shady things happen because people are dumb, not malicious. So for my part I personally believe that the media got addicted to the ratings and felt internal pressure to provide equal coverage even when the scandals were quite unequal.
(b) seems to me like an expression of a naive view of personal identity that makes a binary distinction between anonymity and non-anonymity that doesn't exist in reality in any meaningful sense. Does manipulation against your interests become a non-problem when the manipulator doesn't know the name in your passport? Does it become a non-problem when the manipulator's tools are too imprecise to pick out you specifically, so they apply the same strategy to you and one other person, yielding only a 50% success rate? Does it become a non-problem when they lump you in with three other people? With four? Ten? A hundred? A million?
All of this is about power. Just because power is exercised indirectly or somewhat imprecisely doesn't make it categorically different from someone influencing specifically you, just as poisoning rivers and lakes isn't categorically different from poisoning your food on your plate. It's just a scheme for laundering the power to make it less obvious, and if you allow that, that's what people will do. People who want power don't care how they get it, all they care about is that they get it, so if you tell them that you are OK with being manipulated indirectly, then that's what they will do.
Why are we talking about this?