Social media psyops don't require all of the people to be puppets. You just spread some ideas around that get picked up by normal people, make some opinions get seen by the right people, etc. They are mostly not starting fires, but are simply adding a tiny bit of fuel here and there, which gets amplified by the internet.

All of the excessive online moderation actually works against it. When I started using the internet, there was a golden rule: "don't believe anything on the internet". Nowadays people think platforms will only show them the truth, but in reality you're being put into a filterbubble, an echo chamber of an opinion that keeps fueling itself.