I have a more sinister wall of text take on this that goes a bit deeper than the obvious addiction and fake-living angles (which are both very real, very bad, and well documented).
Now in the 2020s, the problems of social media go far deeper than losing grip on your own mental and physical well being.
Social media, when defined as a technology that lets us instantly communicate and share images/video/audio with anyone we want across the world and have that information saved to a profile of sorts with complete control over who can view it, is merely a useful tool for some people. But as with any other useful tool, a huge percentage of the human race tends to use it for propaganda and idiotic tribal bullying purposes. We're not smart enough as a whole species to handle giving this kind of power to everyone (evil shitfuck corporations and governments, included).
IMO, what Metal Gear Solid 2 spoke of is now a reality. What was once a unifying tool designed to help humanity communicate has become a festering hellhole that's turning people into psychos, liars, and double/triple/quadruple agents with agendas and ulterior motives. Bad, manipulative groups out there are now exploiting this and attempting to sway the population in a far more effective way than TV or radio ever could. It's not just people anymore, either - AI is now being used to invent "mass perceptions" of real (or not real) events out of thin air, practically indistinguishable from the way real humans would express themselves, in small enough interactions.
By now, you've most likely read many human-sounding comments posted by an AI on YouTube videos, Twitch chats, online game chat (particularly MMOs), and all of social media - without realizing it. In the latter case, they probably even have a profile picture and a bunch of "photos" that were generated by the same tech as
thispersondoesnotexist.com. You've probably seen your fair share of deepfakes without noticing, maybe even some weird ass videos of "world leaders" where something just doesn't seem quite right. When these things are convincing enough, they might just trick you into thinking that a lot of other people in the world are thinking a certain way, when in fact they are not. This is very bad for the human race.
In MGS2, it's explained that the AI eventually got advanced enough to basically just decide that all humans are idiot trash, stopped doing what its designers wanted it to do (sway public opinion for their own personal gain), and totally seized control of the flow of information to create some kind of Matrix-like world that even its creators became trapped in. Now, for us, that last part is still very much sci-fi. We're not quite at that stage yet - we're still in the "use AI to flood the social wires with fake people saying things so we can manufacture outrage and fear, paint a narrative, and seize control" stage. Which, unfortunately for us, is still a very terrible direction for us to be heading in.
Some choice quotes from the famous MGS2 dialogue:
The digital society furthers human flaws and selectively rewards the development of convenient half-truths. Just look at the strange juxtapositions of morality around you. Billions spent on new weapons in order to humanely murder other humans. Rights of criminals are given more respect than the privacy of their victims. Although there are people suffering in poverty, huge donations are made to protect endangered species.
Everyone grows up being told the same thing. "Be nice to other people." "But beat out the competition!" "You're special." "Believe in yourself and you will succeed." But it's obvious from the start that only a few can succeed... you exercise your right to "freedom" and this is the result. All rhetoric to avoid conflict and protect each other from hurt. The untested truths spun by different interests continue to churn and accumulate in the sandbox of political correctness and value systems.
Everyone withdraws into their own small gated community, afraid of a larger forum. They stay inside their little ponds, leaking whatever "truth" suits them into the growing cesspool of society at large. The different cardinal truths neither clash nor mesh. No one is invalidated, but nobody is right. Not even natural selection can take place here. The world is being engulfed in "truth." And this is the way the world ends. Not with a bang, but a whimper.
So they're saying that everyone has their own, cute little "truth", and believes everyone else's truth is wrong because it's not theirs. In reality, there is only one objective truth, and maybe some people are aware of that truth - but the overwhelming flood of fake truths saturating the world ensure that the real one never rises to the top. In this scenario, natural selection has been stopped dead in its tracks, and now only decline, hardship, and regression are possible. We as a species escaped this once, but in an ironic turn of events, the technology that made information and even objective truth free and boundless has been weaponized against us to the point of ultimately sending us back to where we came from. Tribes, caves, ignorance, misunderstanding, and hatred.
There's so much conflicting information being blasted directly in our faces in HD now as a result of social media, it's quite literally impossible for most people to know what is actually true without a hefty amount of manual, physical detective work - so they just take the easy way out and pick a "truth" that they think sounds good to them at the time, usually one that is relatively "comfortable" and easy to swallow because it sounds like something their parents or friends or the TV said once.
