One could argue it did work, just a little too well. In 1995 forget trans rights, gay marriage was just starting to become a question and about half of white people were still against interracial marriage. As the one atheist kid in that era, I was certainly an outlier and society still regarded it as a default that everyone was religious. Basically only black people were worried about whether police were beating people up too much and for the vast majority the only question was why we weren’t being harsher on criminals. Society’s views on things have changed very rapidly as a result of being able to access information very easily.
I think what we’re seeing today is not a result of the internet, but a reaction to the result of the internet. Things have changed too fast for some and there’s basically a cultural luddite movement.
There was a window where the internet was a huge positive.
That ended 10 to 15 years ago.
Kinda coinciding with social media apps.
It’s almost like corporations took over the internet, monetized it, and deployed every possible tool to convert it into an addicting advertising platform without any regulations or standards, driving up social contention, misinformation and propaganda because the more rage you can instill in the population the more “engagement” everything will get.