I don't believe there is a grand conspiracy with shadowy bond-villainesque bad guys. It's simply that there is positive pressure in one direction (to have an easier-to-manage populace) and negative pressure in the other (to have a virtuous populace (harder to manage)).
I think it's simpler than that. It's memetics. Bad/wrong ideas infect brains, and propagate themselves by making believing those ideas fashionable. People then act according to the incentives. Some borrow the occult concept "egregore" describe the emergent behaviour.
Making the population easier to manage doesn't need to be an explicit goal, it's an emergent outcome of many many different policies that target other things and are incentivized.
Making money from mass populations works better with more homogeneity of demand, and social media in particular provides a lot of effective levers to promote that homogeneity.
It is many people's jobs to influence memetics, and they're succeeding.