Comment by nearbuy

"Manipulated" has strong negative connotations, but it could just mean that the results are chosen and controlled by the search engine. In which case, it's a meaningless statement. The entire purpose of any search engine is to choose results for queries.

Or it can mean the results were altered from some ideal baseline algorithm that we consider unmanipulated. The only obvious candidate for this baseline would be the search engine's regular algorithm. But if you're saying that's not the baseline, then it's unclear what you consider to be the true baseline and therefore unclear what "manipulated" means.

I agree that countries may consider search engines, social media, or anything else that can affect flow of information to be a national security threat.