Sure is a great thing to have given control of the public square to for-profit companies.
Why was Iran “unexpected”? Iran and Russia are longtime allies. That’s like saying, “and unexpectedly North Korea”.
(1) For the last couple of centuries where “the public square” consisted mainly of print newspapers, and increasingly of radio stations and television stations, for-profit commercial enterprises controlled what content got distributed. Sometimes (e.g. Hearst 1890s) those companies manipulated information for their own purposes. They didn’t need to be exploited by foreign operations.
(2) The current batch (e.g. Facebook, Twitter) is directly usable by hundreds of millions of real people (and billions of trollbots) to express any message (until removed for policy violations) without people needing to persuade an editorial staff to run an op-ed or a letter-column submission. For better and for worse, normal people can spread content much more openly and easily than ever before. The corporations now have less power in that sense.
(3) Most importantly, you don’t have to treat the public square as being under Facebook/Twitter/etc. control merely because lazier, weaker, less thoughtful people choose to treat it that way.
