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Obviously advertising is not 100% effective, anyone claiming that is being silly. Likewise it's silly to think that ad surveillance companies such as GOOG, with its near trillion dollar market cap, and the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on advertising each year in the US does not have a disproportionate influence of the consciousness of society.

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But Google's, influence on society comes from its ability to control all the information you see - if you use Google for all searches - over an extended period of time.

Crucially, we are exposed to political advertising from many different sides of the political spectrum. I regularly see both Bloomberg and Trump ads. The domain in which we see political advertising is not controlled by the advertisers themselves, so that is a fundamental difference from Google's influence.

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