Yep - if you think it through - the Covid pandemic handily moved social interaction online, where they can wade through it all at their leisure to gather more material to use to "nudge" and feed into their manipulation machine. And as some of the behaviour on here shows - nudge people a little bit, and they'll do the more extreme nudging for you themselves.
If you haven't - it's worth reading the Big Brother Watch report on it all and how Twitter trends etc were scrutinised for information to inform further nudging.
What scared me most of all was watching my mother, a journalist by trade who had brought me up knowing about things like lulls in the news cycle needing to be filled and the way the media could be manipulated, being turned into a terrified reclusive old granny convinced Covid was going to kill her - she aged about 2 decades in 6 months because she refused to leave the house and she still believes we didn't lock down fast enough or hard enough - despite seeing the massive damage it caused to DD2. Thankfully in DD2's case, we've managed to fight tooth and nail to undo the worst of the damage caused by it all and then her hysterical visor toting teacher who spent the following year in a black and yellow hazard taped box at the front of the class half-assing her job before finally retiring (I'm not joking - they had a perspex bank screen they would take around the classroom if they had to dare go near a small child) - she's back just about working at expected level academically, in a different school but I don't think she'll ever fully get to where she could have been if she had that year 2 where everything was well set up for her SEND, in a supportive school with a superb class teacher - followed by the lost year 3 because that teacher blatantly and openly didn't think schools should ever have reopened and took it out on the kids - and the covid rules that nutjob implemented in her classroom were so extreme she lived in such a state of high anxiety that she couldn't learn much anyway. She went from a kid with challenges and SEN who was holding her own OK academically - to one who just fell by the wayside and if you think about the potential for that over a lifetime in terms of loss of opportunities and income - it's awful.
One of DD1's best friends just completely disengaged from learning - refused to do home learning and would just openly defy her parents, who were not really literate enough to support much to start with and have another child who was mid-ASD diagnosis they were dealing with (who fell off all the waiting lists and now has been put back a year at school and is failing spectacularly)... no IT access (we ended up finding an old laptop and formatting it for her), no support from school for them not having any IT access - and this child who was a very bright, able reader has never ever re-engaged with school... attendance now rock bottom as she'll refuse to go (she's 10!), never ever does homework because of all that time when the school set it but refused to touch it in case it brought in home "germs" or other spurious shit, and she's heading for a route where if she remains in school and not pregnant till age 16+ it'll be a fucking miracle. We tried our damndest to support from the distance allowed - even trying to get the kids to sit on a call and work through their homework together with me supporting - but she's heading toward being lost completely.
And still no one cares. The loathesome teaching unions are just gleefully blaming parents for not singing fucking nursery rhymes while doing their own jobs all day and if you dare have one fucking thread on a parenting website calling out the damage caused by this all to kids - you get accused of fucking harassment and threatened with the law. I did a dissertation full of interviews from parents and the big thing that came out of it all was that kids had lost the confidence and certainty in "normal" - they no longer believed that they'd get up on a Monday morning and get to go to school and then play football or go to Brownies or whatever - they didn't trust their families and society that this would be allowed to happen. We're a developed country in the year 2023 - it should not be an issue of question for children on a large scale that their education is going to happen on a daily basis - yes, we get freak snow days, water leaks and boiler failures - but these were rare events, and generally snow days were a cause for getting the sledge out and enjoying - but now it's "switch to remote learning" at the slightest inconvenience - no wonder kids are fucking confused as fuck and don't trust or value things - they've had them yanked away from them before so cruelly (I'll never forgive Boris for re-closing the schools and announcing it AFTER the kids had gone to bed that night - just to leave a nice early morning bombshell for parents to break the following day).
I mentioned before - we got bollocked by school at one point for DD1 asking why they were hysterically anti-bacterial wiping everything against a virus. I'm actually quite proud of a then-8/9 year old realising that viruses were not bacteria and being able to ask the question and wondering about bacterial resistance... but school went fucking ballistic about it. They could have had a small moment to discuss that it was the alcohol content in the wipes (allegedly - although I suspect at that point it was more fancy smell and optimism than alcohol content in them) and there was possibly a good science teaching point about what a virus and and a bacteria was, and why handwashing helped... but they decided to basically lay into DD1 and us as heretics instead. Don't implement rules you're not prepared or able to defend fuckers.