The left and the right disagree on who is authoritarian here, and who then inherits the privilege of using Orwell to lambast the other side for it.
(2020 nuance: although one of these parties at least didn't balk at the pandemic)
If your whole society is riddled through with ignorance, delusional thinking, lazy consumerism, and privacy holes, eventually an adversary will put together enough information to blackmail someone powerful into putting their finger on the scale, just a little bit. The more this happens, the more corrupt the system becomes, and the more cynical the population. The adversary has won.
No, we need defense-in-depth, and for that we need citizens willing to learn more about computers in general. Now would be a great time to start a National Guard but for cyberwarfare, and open to anyone with a browser.
To reuse your example: does the idea of an authoritarian figure quoting 1984 not seem shady and manipulative to you? Clearly the ideas contained in the original work were very anti-authoritarian, regardless of whether Orwell's words can be twisted or taken out of context to imply something else.