Snow Crash combined with Selfish Gene and infection theory provides a neat mental model of what's happening. Basically you get a constant bacground of competing

Snow Crash combined with Selfish Gene and infection theory provides a neat mental model of what's happening. Basically you get a constant bacground of competing memes all the time. But since the competition is fierce, none of them becomes too powerful. The elections made a lot of people more susceptible to infections and ideas become to spread. The social media provides the number of contacts necessary as well as increasing the transmission likelyhood as it forms echo chambers. It all makes sense.