This is not like the days of old where television/radio/newspapers pushed their opinions to the public en masse. It's social media, where everything is tailored to you, personally, available to you on your personal device that you carry with you everywhere 24/7, and it makes it so much harder to resist it.

That couldn't happen with the mass media of old. It wasn't tailored for you, so there were enough rough edges that you could stop and say "Hey, this guy's an asshole!" and break the loop. It wasn't with you all the time , sneaking in during that 30 second scroll of your phone when you're bored.

Now, it's continuous reinforcement where a tiny aspect of your profile matches a tiny part of their message, so you see it in your feed, and then it slowly cycles you through more and more of what they want you to see, until your interests match their interests and their opinions seem normal, because you see them all the time.

Brainwashing, essentially. And it's very hard to get yourself out of it.