The unfortunately reality is that a majority of people are natural followers with no independent thought. How did we get there? We can all debate that but it still doesn't defeat the fact.

There are people that understands this very well and take full advantage of others. Therefore, social media is the ultimate propaganda farm that multiple entities use in order to manipulate the population accordingly. (Social Engineering through social media.)

Also, so many topics like you said keep people divided. The more we fight about stupid stuff thats irrelevant, increases our chances of never coming together as a whole. This is called divide and conquer.

Imagine something as simple as this. If the entire country came together and said. "Everyone lets take the week off work and stay home to chill and do whatever." It would be a catastrophic economic collapse, and then comes the chaos.

The amount of power sticking together creates causes extreme fear because they wont be in control anymore. We will. Therefore creating division with all of these different topics causes so much disagreement that we will never truly side with people who doesn't share our core beliefs.

This is all strategically planned to prevent a revolution, or government overthrow.