its amazing that this exact scenario was described in Metal Gear Solid 2, a ~20 year old video game.
>Colonel : But in the current, digitized world, trivial information is
accumulating every second, preserved in all its triteness. Never
fading, always accessible.
>Rose : Rumors about petty issues, misinterpretations, slander...
>Colonel : All this junk data preserved in an unfiltered state, growing at
an alarming rate.
>Rose : It will only slow down social progress, reduce the rate of
evolution.
A lot of people--authors, technologists, public intellectuals, and others in what was the broad spectrum of 'nerd culture' at the time--saw this crap coming decades ago but lost the fight to stop it.
The writing has been on the wall about the dangers of social media for a very long time. It's just taken this long for people with the power to even consider doing anything about the dangers to start taking it seriously.
I'm speaking from remembering things I read over the past few decades on Usenet (yes, that far back) and on blogs. I'd be amazed if any of this is still online.
Going back even further than that, however, James Burke's Connections warned of the risks of weaponized data mining in 1978, decades before Facebook commercialized the use of data mining to sell behavior modification as a service.
Dystopian futures aren't hard to predict. The hard part is getting enough people to listen to the predictions to prevent them from coming to fruition.
>Colonel : But in the current, digitized world, trivial information is accumulating every second, preserved in all its triteness. Never fading, always accessible.
>Rose : Rumors about petty issues, misinterpretations, slander...
>Colonel : All this junk data preserved in an unfiltered state, growing at an alarming rate.
>Rose : It will only slow down social progress, reduce the rate of evolution.