You may well be right, though rose-tinted is not something I am often accused of by my less cynical friends (all of them!)
But the public and digital nature of it is of a different order to any “in private” shenanigans that went on before, and its specific focus on directly interfering with elections is perhaps new. (Oh, wait, did ‘the west’ never try that …hmm, maybe I should stop at this point) 
