The less conspiratorial take on this is that social media simply exacerbates and foments conflict, period. Maybe some of these involved significant coordinated

The less conspiratorial take on this is that social media simply exacerbates and foments conflict, period. Maybe some of these involved significant coordinated propaganda efforts, but I doubt they all did. The mistake the western world made was thinking that this social media generated conflict was a result of some coherent "positive" motivation, when perhaps it was simply blind social media outrage that coincided with revolutions in places we thought were bad somehow. It exacerbated it first in the middle east, maybe because those societies were close to conflict to start with, but the western world doesn't seem that far behind.