Yes, there were always some rules for some subgroup that caused political discussions and that's fine.
The problem starts when the bandwidth gets saturated. I don't say that people just should shut the f up and follow the rules, I'm simply saying that this saturated state is very bad.
This has always been the case - some sub-groups of the population didn't notice it because it wasn't their/our bandwidth being consumed. Pick any past century or decade, and I will name a group whose world was consumed by politics then.