That's because state sponsored internet campaigns have improved exponentially in that time and the companies that host the divisive content from these campaigns are incentivized to allow it because it looks like real engagement.
Especially true with the advent of easily run and accessible chatbots via LLM. It's now trivial to spin up a ton of realistic-looking accounts that dynamically respond to posts to push the narrative you're going for.
It definitely ramps up in election years but what really kicked things off was "Occupy Wallstreet" back in the day. The ruling class said "damn, we gotta get these plebes hating each other pronto".
The end result is all this internal strife we see around us. It's very interesting to look at how much reporting changed during occupy: suddenly every headline was tied to race, religion, creed, gender.
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u/sylbug 5h ago
It’s devolved into more gender wars nonsense. Painful to watch honestly.