“Precisely at the time where one king arises to pillage our possessions and destroy us, another shall arise to protect and save us...this is an important lesson for future generations.”
NACHMANIDES
15th century Rabbi, physician and biblical commentator
Eventually, of course, actual agitators and assets figured out about the space, but mostly socially anxious, awkward, autistic, and weird people who are mostly social online instead of in real life got massively politically empowered all at once, and then the crazy people came in.
Crazy people have a superpower on social media because, unlikely in real life, they can't really be shunned and quarantined very easily. Plus, they can just keep changing forms and finding new audiences, if that's relevant. And you're only dealing with an image of them, not their whole person, where more of the crazy would show.
Crazy people are insanely destructive on social media, especially in politics, and there's basically no workable remedy to it.
Social media suddenly shifting a large percentage, if not the bulk, of our political discourse to a format favoring these kinds of people more or less derailed society. Some of that was probably necessary, but most of it has been insanely damaging.
And as I said, then the bad guys figured this all out and added their problems to the pile. And then the just straight third worlders who interact in third world ways in first-world "public squares."