Remember when they told us that social media would "spread democracy" ?

No, I don’t. I remember when the internet would (it did!) and Usenet would (it did!) and irc and open source and the web (they did!) but social media was always about entertainment and (one way or another) monetization of those technologies. It’s the cancer of our collective mind and achievements.

Isn't that precisely why this is happening? Because it's doing exactly that, and the people in power in these countries don't like it?

“Spread democracy” means “manipulate public opinion to submit to USA”.

That includes censoring content that threatens puppet governments.

Who told you that, the entire point was to talk to girls you lacked the courage to strike up a conversation with.

Saying ‘hi, I also like that band you have a shirt of’ was just too hard so we had to create trillion dollar monstrosities.

I’ve never heard a single time social media companies say that social media would spread democracy. Sounds like a straw man to me

It can and does. The power of social media to spread ideas and accelerate political action is why fascists took it over and co-opted it. That's why we're fed the narrative that social media is evil and needs to be regulated or banned at all costs.