Well when you have technical systems that have the ability to influence what you buy, what movies you see, what you eat, how you view politics and so on it tends to take on an insidious role in peoples lives without them even realizing it. I also tend to subscribe to the notion that large groups of people tend to jump through various states of psychosis based on external input from media and things that happen in the world. This puts people in an emotional state where what the see and hear can have a different impact than if they were thinking rationally. It's one reason why something like QAnon worked so well as a mind virus, it's the one thing that triggers the emotional versus logical response for everyone.

Then I think you can look back at recent events from the past decade or more and see the impact of this. Whether you want to start with Kazakhstan this past week, the way opposing groups were targeted to fight each other in real life like was seen in Houston, or the reaction to a "youtube video" during Benghazi in Libya, the way that Trump and Cambridge Analytica kind of took over the GOP, or maybe even how Obama went from a relatively unknown politician to having a cult of personality around him a few months later. Another part of the psychological aspect of it is something called the information-action ratio. Basically people are overwhelmed with information that they can do absolutely nothing about. This leads to certain emotional responses caused by feeling a loss of control that also makes people more easily manipulated by what they are fed by these systems.

It's not much of a conspiracy if you have used technology and tried to pay attention to how it makes you feel and act at times. This is a large part of how so many people became radicalized from recommendation engines and targeted advertisements. It's like mind hacking in a way. But that's just like, my opinion, man.