I don't believe this is a problem caused by giving more people a voice. In fact I think it's somewhat more insidious than that. The most psychologically useful tool in the marketeer's toolbox is outrage.
We are wired to respond to it in a very certain way and then the outrage becomes normalised as more extreme positions are taken.
I wrote a big post about this all the way back when Mancini was our manager regarding the community here on Bluemoon and the "Cabal". We could have done a sociological study on here about how that situation developed and me and Ahsan have waxed lyrical on it a few times.
The situation starts reasonably with "I think Mancini made a mistake" vs "I think Mancini's ideas made sense" and then as the frustration of not being heard intensifies, the defensiveness does and people start taking more extreme positions. So it goes from Mancini made a mistake, to Mancini makes lots of mistakes, to Mancini is a bad manager, to Mancini is a crap manager, to Mancini is a complete fraud. On the other side it goes from Mancini's ideas make sense, to Mancini has a lot of good ideas, to Mancini is a great manager, to Mancini is the best manager in the world who cannot be criticised.
The transition is simple as people jump to their slightly more extreme ideas and then justify them later and then it becomes a very normal idea to them, so the next time they want to make a hyperbolic post to top somebody else's post, they go even further down the line.
At the end you're left with a bunch of people with extreme ideas and any new information that comes at them which very obviously won't fit into their mental model of what reality is supposed to look like is met with hostility, disbelief or the old chestnut in football of "bad/good luck". Mancini either won the title because he's a footballing super genius who motivated a failing and entitled squad or really he won it because he fluked it and Khaldoon did a big team talk. No middle ground, no nuance, no thinking involved.
This is the problem I have with a lot of the social justice movement and to an extent the pro/anti-Trump crowd and have expressed this pretty early in this thread. People aren't judging situations in good faith and instead have their preconceived positions that they try to jam in new information no matter how badly it fits. The worst thing about the social justice movement is how easily they drop their whole moral philosophies when the opportunity to ridicule "the Other" comes at them. They're negotiable on identity which isn't a moral philosophy and is just the Racial League Table taken to another degree. The
fundamental philosophy of the Left and why I consider myself left wing is based on an absolute commitment to personal liberty and freedom. Having structures, whether societal structures, social norms or literal authority structures telling people that they can't do something that other people can do because who they are, how old they are, where they come from, what they look like, etc is the thing that the Left is supposed to fight against. That was always the plan but as more and more people have taken up extreme positions they've gone all the way round from "other people can do this too" to "you can't do this but other people can". It's authoritarianism and why I can't sign up for post-modern "Liberalism" and will happily sit in my functionally Blairite neo-liberal camp.
Something that is developing in the post-modern left is this idea that democracy is a structurally flawed idea and that "the common people" are the enemy because they're "uneducated" or "an IST such as racist, sexist, homophobe....ist" which is a shit way of saying they don't agree with you on every political position. I can't argue against this strongly enough. Democracy is the saviour of the world because people at their core, even people who hold right wing beliefs, are fundamentally good and moral. Outside of an extremely tiny amount of people who make up about 0.000000001% of the world, we all wish to have the same thing which is a world that is prosperous and moral for our children to live in and grow. Only the method of how we define those things are different. If you cannot start a political argument understanding that both you and the person opposite you is attempting to achieve that then you're part of the problem already.
Democracy and the people having a voice is the pilot light of all human progress. Don't confuse a psychological manipulation trick used by the media to increase content engagement with the core beliefs of rational people. Democracy is worth protecting and championing. In fact I'd argue it's one of the ONLY things in the world that's worth championing and protecting with ferocity.