As you may or may not be aware, the British people are heading to polling stations today to vote on who will govern them for the next few years. It’s an important day for me, as a European living and working in a country that’s decided to decouple itself from the European Union, but it’s also deeply fascinating from a professional perspective because of what it illustrates about the internet’s growing influence on everyday life. The way British people vote today will be influenced, in large or in small part, by the actions and decisions of people many miles outside of the UK: those Silicon Valley executives in charge of Google and Facebook’s massive online empires.

On the surface, neither Facebook nor Google has been politically active…

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