What evidence is there that we are heading towards a breakdown in society due to social media?

 What evidence is there that we are heading towards a breakdown in society due to social media?

I don't know if a breakdown is the best way to describe the threat of social media. In the book Surveillance Capitalism the issue is described at length and the fact that governments may use emerging technologies to try to monitor, predict, and control the behavior, thoughts, and emotions of populations is a threat to personal freedom that may be greater than any other.

A future where at first corporations then governments work to constantly monitor the citizens and know everything they write, everything they buy, everything they look at, and for exactly how long on the television or computer or phone and every place they go and everything they buy and how long they do any activity they do is a frightening invasion of privacy. Additionally they use algorithms to monitor your behavior more precisely than any human could.

The algorithms are useful in determining what content to send you to prompt desired behavior on your part, namely being engaged with a content provider, whether Facebook or YouTube or another. You are covertly persuaded to be online more, providing more information about yourself to use to more accurately predict your behavior and predict how to control your actions, but being online more, or craving it, may not be good for you or your mental health. But companies are willing to sacrifice your well-being and mental health for profit.

Additionally they can use monitors on your person to track productivity. Amazon has warehouse employees monitored to the second to ensure they are as productive as possible every second of every day, no time for talking or a moment of rest or going to the bathroom. Soon many more employers may use this technology and have employees monitored by algorithms and cameras every second at work. Municipalities have already allowed big tech companies to install cameras in their cities to monitor the population, so your every move from home to work and back is also recorded. The enormous raw data can be gone over in fine precision by algorithms and the management knows how close to perfect you are each second.

We can have a future as nearly absolutely controlled employees monitored every single second and as private citizens every single second watched by the government and we can be monitored for loyalty to the government based on the content we watch and who we associate with.

Social media is more of a threat to create a totalitarian state than a breakdown of the current one.