The thing is, if they wanted to influence an election they could easily do it. They could start to feed you content which is bias towards "their" candidate, and there is no way you could probe they did that intentionally because "it's just an algorithm".

They don't need to and it would be too risky and not worth the tech debt tbh.

lol, a targeted propaganda machine would be worth every bit of a tech debt for an authoritarian regime.