I don't know if the movements were suddenly under attack. What is more clear to me is many became more overt and loud after Trump was elected. There was a sense of urgency and threat based on nothing other than what Trump and others like Bannon had said. Mind you, just said. Whether they were actual threats (or are) is definitely a legitimate (if separate) debate. Your causality is, however, arguing that the reverse happened: the opening shot came from the Trump side.

I don't think this discussion has much to do with the Facebook story above, however.

I think the question of news manipulation based on headlines[1] affects both the left and the right and happened to be facilitated by Facebook and its hungry data chewers. It's got to monetize that somehow, right?

Oh, and I remember when the Facebook IPO happened a bunch of buddies at a large investment bank argued that there was no way a platform like that had any value, etc. and so forth. And I remember arguing that the data they had had some value, we just don't know (and I didn't know) just for what, yet.

1 - https://medium.com/the-mission/the-enemy-in-our-feeds-e86511... <-- You all must read this!