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Scope and scale don't transition into being a problem until they begin to behave with a political (or religious, or...) bias and work to influence their customers in ways outside of providing value. Your phone company, auto manufacturer or favorite restaurant chain should want to provide value regardless of their customers' politics.

It's definitely crossing a line for them to covertly influence the political leanings of their customers.

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Any decision they make can be classified as "influencing political leanings". If they just serve you content that you agree with, that's influencing your political leaning by reinforcing your beliefs (IMO this is what Youtube already does). If they serve you any other content, unless it's random and therefore useless, then anyone can claim they are influencing political leanings. In fact, any company whose business model includes providing information can be claimed to "influence political leanings" since that's as well-defined as saying "adds information". So a library also falls under this, as does Netflix, and Spotify, etc.

I agree, which is why I specifically said 'covertly'. Netflix and Spotify suggest movies and music they think you'll like, and they tell you they are doing so. Their recommendation engines add value.

When I search Google, there is no disclaimer that they are slanting the results to match their political leanings in order to influence me away from mine.

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