That they can is what has changed. They didn’t have sufficient information to put pressure.

They still had microphones and inquiry drugs, including those causing memory loss. So they knew plenty of what people were saying to each other.

Anyway. Everything has changed a lot, not just technology, and one can’t really make a chain of causation to all this. There are plenty of feedback loops.

The rules now are “we are stronger, so we are forbidding everything we don’t want”. Losing leverage does that.

Until you learn of some way to hit them back, such questions are no good, because not answering them doesn’t cost anything.