What you are talking about is called polling or marketing. It’s structural, not a conspiracy. It’s inherent to most all statistical analysis, and everyone uses statistics.
It is physically possible for a media campaign to be launched to increase the amount of discussion of such topics, which gets the public fired up and arguing with each other, leaving them less attention to pay attention to things like the issues surrounding Occupy Wall Street. Whether this actually happened is an epistemological matter, but it is not polling, and it is not mere marketing, though one could frame it as a kind of marketing: "here are some things to fight over, plebs....are you interested in doing so?".
And this is just one instance. And, defending a claim of nonexistence is essentially impossible, especially when the matter is largely subjective.
Why try to explain what is going on in a way that is unprovable and sounds slightly unhinged? There are structural reasons that can be proven to exist (e.g. engagement metrics) which explain the phenomenon. Occam’s razor.
Why people do the things they do is a good question. For example: why do you speak as if you are omniscient, and perfectly rational, simultaneously? I appreciate that is the norm of the culture we grew up in, but then so was racism ~20 years ago.
Figure that one out and maybe you will be on your way to figuring out your question, and perhaps a large swath of the other outstanding mysteries of "reality".
Can I get some Meme Magic (or radio silence) now? ;)
Which in some cases results in self-fulfilling prophecies like the "footloose church" which believes that dancing is driving young people away from the church instead of the church's own behavior.
For example, most people think in True/False binary: a proposition is either True, or False. If it is an extraordinary proposition, then it "requires" extraordinary evidence, and if "no" extraordinary evidence is available, then it "is" False. "LITERALLY" FLAWLESS "LOGIC" FOR THE WIN!
But if one's thinking is less simplistic (there are various superior gradients above this default approach), the situation "is" (appears, thus "is") very different.
This can easily be realized if the topic of discussion was abstract: psychology, logical fallacies, etc....but if the topic of discussion is an object level, ~"culture war" topic, this knowledge becomes inaccessible to the mind (similar to when a ChatGPT session becomes too long and the initial context (knowledge) has moved out of the active context window).
Humans are extremely interesting, I highly recommend studying their behavior, especially the behavior of the relatively more intelligent ones.