I don't do Facebook, but over the years I've certainly had some... interesting YouTube recommendations. Rather than "you liked that, so here's something similar", it was "here's something completely opposite and political". And it wasn't even the opposite of YouTube vids I'd been watching, but what I'd been reading on other sites. Thanks, cookies.
Around 2016 with the Brexit vote and 1st Trump presidential run I took to clearing my cookies almost daily, because there was almost always a Breitbart cookie on my machine.
Which was very interesting because I'd only ever gone to the Breitbart site a few times to see what they were up to – and once I spotted the regular cookie deliberately stopped going there at all. Cookie still appeared.
So it was clearly being installed by one of the common tricks via another site. I very strongly suspect Mumsnet, because there weren't many sites I used daily or even once a week.
The US 2025 National Security Strategy did state that they were going to try to influence politics in Europe to try to mould us to this US administration's ethno-nationalist vision, so it would be surprising if they weren't doing this again by social media.
Of course Facebook was being paid to work for the 2016 Trump campaign to the point of having Facebook staff embedded in a Trump campaign office.
The Brexit campaign involved many of the same people/organisations: IIRC Steve Bannon, Cambridge Analytica. One of the things they did was profiile a particular demographic as politically disengaged and then target them (a) to vote, and (b) to vote Brexit. The specific way they picked these people up (on Facebook? I can't remember) was to offer a huge prize for some massively unlikely set of football results – "enter all your personal details here for a chance to win the prize!"
TL;DR: I'm interested to hear of these weird new social media "recommendations", both of the overtly political type and the non-political-but-which-demographic-will-click-on-this type.
Might be nothing. Might be something.