The first time you loaded up TheFacebook in high school and saw your friend set his status to "Greg is making dinner!", you thought "ah yes, someday this will topple governments due to disinformation campaigns"?
Are you sure you aren't conflating "it's obvious" with hindsight bias?
In 2008, I made an app go viral on Facebook by posting pro-LGBT / anti-prop-8 ads within a 20 mile radius of SLC. Hundreds of millions of dollars as been invested into the FB platform ecosystem by that point.
We can call it a failure of imagination, but when you have a tool that knows a lot about your political views and your location, we should have predicted that information would be used to hypertarget political propaganda.
And all advertising has the goal of swaying some election - which car you buy, where you get your groceries, what clothes you choose. You think you made those choices without external influence when you didn't.
That's my point, though – that wasn't true in 2006! Maybe, just maybe, I posted "Gregory is voting for ______" in 2008, but that's not how people used Facebook back then.
There was no realtime location collection (no iPhones), no sharing of articles, no commenting on posts, no groups, no minifeed, etc. There wasn't any mechanisms for all the data to be used for targeting. When I started using Facebook, you literally had to go to a person's page to check on them. There was no newsfeed or algorithm or ads. There definitely weren't bots.
It was pretty unimaginable that you could figure out who someone was voting for and influence them based on how FB was in 2006. Now, of course, it's different.
> "Are you sure you aren't conflating "it's obvious" with hindsight bias?"
no, i avoided facebook at the start because it was obvious what it was going to be. with google, it was 2005 or so (about a year after the gmail launch) that i started weaning myself off of google.
that folks wore blinders willingly doesn't mean it wasn't easy to connect the dots.
Are you sure you aren't conflating "it's obvious" with hindsight bias?