> Perhaps they couldn't stop it

Pretty sure they could, at least early on. Come on, they had absolute power over company strategy. The most important people (their smartest developers, like Jeff Dean etc, by all accounts, didn't care much about stuff like this.)

> or felt that tamping down on employee discussion would cost more than it would benefit?

No-one apart from you is calling this tampering.

> Or maybe they've realized that Google cannot be neutral

Or maybe all of this bias is accidental because all they cared about was freedom, and while the two founders were away jetskiing, the company grew in a very particular political direction?