If 2016 was the year that left us all too stunned to understand Brexit and Donald Trump, 2017 was the year that finally shed some light on the social media machine at the heart of major shifts in both politics and society.

With fake news, bots, troll factories, Russians and the far right dominating the conversation, it’s been tricky trying to pick all of this apart and gain any genuine understanding of what’s going on.

But the first clues emerged when a firm called Cambridge Analytica – described by one former employee as a business in psychological warfare - started popping up. The company provides assistance to election campaigns by harnessing data and targeting voters with more bespoke, effective messages, and it had two recent customers in particular that immediately grabbed the world’s attention: Donald Trump and Nigel Farage’s Leave campaign in Britain.

It’s not unusual in the modern age for political campaigns to seek the services of firms specialising in, effectively, behaviour manipulation. This goes beyond the good faith most people hold in election campaigning: the idea is that different parties try and persuade us that they’re the ones for the job and we have a period of time devoted to understanding their manifestos before making up our minds and going out to vote.

But in 2017, the power of data and psychology was laid bare in an urgent way. What we now know is the extent to which modern tech companies are tracking the data trails we leave all over the internet and on social media, to formulate messages and tactics most likely to persuade people to vote favourably for a candidate not based on their ability to win the argument, but because they’ve been emotionally manipulated – and they were completely unaware of it.

Psy-ops is not new. It’s how governments and militaries sway public opinion, it’s part of never-ending propaganda wars. But we’ve entered a new era of it thanks to Big Data and a willingness from the public to disregard their own privacy to feed their social media addictions.

I’m now acutely aware when I log on to Facebook that the social network is developing tools to entice me back again and again, playing with my mind to trigger all the right parts in its favour. I’m also aware that companies like Cambridge Analytica, and many others with various different interests, are grabbing my data trails – even I barely understand how much information I’m giving away or where I’m leaving it in cyberspace – and using my information to try and influence my political thinking, encourage me to buy things I don’t need and, well, who even knows what else?

Sure, advertising and campaigning tactics aren’t new, but the personal nature of what we’re seeing now raises huge questions about how much we value our privacy, and what a lack of care for it can create.

But 2017 wasn’t just a story of Cambridge Analytica’s role in influencing opinion. Russia dominated headlines because of suspicions about its use of social media psy-ops to subvert international politics. A weaker Europe and a weaker US changes Russia’s position on the global landscape, and story after story emerged suggesting links between Russia, Trump and Brexit.

We heard of Russian ‘troll factories’ infiltrating social media to dominate and control online discussions. Critics accused Russia of a strategic campaign utilising social media to influence voters by creating numerous phoney accounts, a claim Vladimir Putin denies.

On top of that, investigations into links between Russia and the Trump election campaign got underway in the US, and it’s really no surprise that everyone’s confused as hell about what’s going on. Nobody knows any more whether the anonymous social media accounts they’ve been following are expressing genuine opinions or trying to disrupt debate. People aren’t sure what fake news is or when they’re reading it. It’s difficult to come to any judgement about just who exactly is trying to influence what: Is the far right using Cambridge Analytica and western tech companies to further their political agenda? Or is Russia stoking up the far right and manipulating events in order to further the Kremlin's agenda? Or does any of this even matter? Is it possible that people voted for Trump and Brexit because they’re suffocating under the weight of austerity and inequality, and all of this is distracting us from dealing with what’s on our doorsteps?

Back in Britain, another political party caused an upset so unexpected that it inspired Oxford Dictionaries’ word of the year, ‘youthquake’. While Brexit Britain was weathering yet another Tory infighting storm, culminating in Prime Minister Theresa May calling a snap general election, Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party was eyeing up its own social media prospects. Labour invested resources into social media advertising, particularly on the youth-orientated Snapchat, and it fuelled the ‘Jez We Can’ movement.

Across the country, Corbyn was attending packed rallies offline while campaigners flooded online media. Traditional media – much of which had been hostile to Corbyn – took a back seat in his campaign priorities, and the strategy paid off when May lost her majority in the Commons and the country was left stunned by a hung parliament when the election campaign had begun with expectations of Labour being obliterated at the polls.

Meanwhile, tales of social media abuse and harassment continued. It hit headlines again when MPs faced a torrent of abuse during the general election campaign, although the year at least finished on a slightly more positive note as women used the #MeToo campaign on sexual harassment and violence to overwhelm national debate about the scale of the problem – a campaign which saw its architects, dubbed ‘the silence-breakers’, win Time’s Person of the Year award.

And so, with the power of social media exposed on so many different levels – not only has it become central in political events, but traditional media is also being decimated in the process as giants like Facebook and Google soak up the advertising revenue newspapers used to enjoy – the leaders of our networks must have been humbled by the responsibility they now have, right?

Well, not really. Despite the clear evidence of social networks’ established place at the core of global communication, our social media masters still deny their role as publishers, shifting the weight of responsibility onto users themselves as the authors of content.

But rather than a deliberate disregard for doing something about these mounting problems, I wonder whether they’re a little overwhelmed by the pace of events themselves.

A few voices in 2017 in particular indicated how social networks have been caught by surprise. Twitter co-founder Evan Williams actually apologised for any role the site had played in the rise of Trump, and he admitted he’d held a naïve assumption that mass, global communication would be positive, saying: “I thought once everybody could speak freely and exchange information and ideas, the world is automatically going to be a better place. I was wrong about that.”

Then, former Facebook executive Chamath Palihapitiya spoke of his regret at taking part in creating social media tools that “are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works”.

“This is not about Russian ads,” he went on. “This is a global problem. It is eroding the core foundations people behave by and between each other.”

Furthermore, former Facebook president Sean Parker warned this year: “It [Facebook] literally changes your relationship with society, with each other. It probably interferes with productivity in weird ways. God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.”

But as everyone scrambles to get to grips with what all of this tech power means, it’s still racing ahead. We’re now in the beginning stages of a huge shift towards automation in the workplace and the advancement of artificial intelligence. The worrying thing is that there seems to be little comprehension of how utterly transformative this will be. Our political systems can’t keep up with technical change, and it seems even the tech executives responsible for our emerging new world order are often as surprised as the rest of us at what they’ve created.

If 2017 was the year we finally opened our eyes to the power of tech, 2018 must become the year we take responsibility.