>>520572 (OP)
Social Media didn't have an impact on the masses. It was the masses that had an impact on social media. The masses, the collective consciousness of a region or ethnic group, and of humanity as a whole, has always been a paranoid schizotypal tyrant with a moral stick up it's ass. It's just that people were so atomized by geographic distance and lag time in the communication flow before that you never got a feedback loop of this size before. At best, you could see it manifest in larger cities. One of the roles of the old media institutions was to provide a sort of false collective consciousness from which to try to mold the behavior of atomized individuals and stamp out inconvenient emergent behavior of smaller pockets of collective consciousness. Yet that guardrail has fallen by the wayside in the digital age. The big tech companies who run these social media sites have attempted to step up to fill that role, but they don't know what they're doing and don't have an absolute monopoly on narratives the way the old media infrastructure could. It is a bubbling pot of madness that they can no longer keep the lid on. Hence, they will attempt to use another consciousness - an automaton consciousness, to counteract and attempt to control the human collective consciousness as it can edit and rewrite perceived reality faster than the brain can, returning a level of atomization to the system via "inoculating" individuals by surrounding individuals with layers of controlled bot activity.
Once the collective consciousness of humanity has once again been shackled and yoked, we likely will see a period of stability lasting until direct brain interfaces become as popular as smart phones, allowing for the atomized individual (and their integration with personalized AI acting as anti-inoculation agents) to operate at the cognitive speed of the automatonical consciousness. At which point the system will again start to lose cohesion.