I think the key is that everybody expected that technology would decrease the effectiveness of bullshitting. Local bullshitting relies on there being nobody in the room to say "BS" -- or at least, a small enough number that wishful thinking could dominate. And the bullshitter knew that their time was limited before somebody called them out.

The truth-tellers were expected to have an advantage: once the truth was seen, most people would recognize and accept it. The bullshitter's advantage was the slow speed of information diffusion.

Turns out that is wrong. People are regularly given definitive rejections of bullshit, and they deny them. It's not that they haven't seen it, but that they choose to accept the bullshitter's reality. We always expected to be able to fool some of the people all of the time... but we assumed that "some" was a number in the single-digit percentages, not a majority or near majority of the (connected, first) world.

I still don't know what to make of it. I'm pretty glum, to be honest. And I believe that's a lot of the point. I think that a lot of people choose to accept bullshit precisely because they think it hurts people they don't like. They may even grasp that it's false, but simply don't care. The negative consequences to them are sufficiently far off as to be dismissed, but the upside of having people angry at them is immediate.