Gonna disagree here.

Humans have always had "social media", but it's not been directed by a cadre of oligarchs until recently.

I mean shit, humans have been sitting around the campfire telling stories to each other going all the fucking way back to forever. Sure, a campfire story isn't a tweet, but for our monkey brains it's essentially the same thing: how we interact with our social groups and learn what's going on around us.

The problem is that the campfire stories couldn't be manipulated into making your cavemen neighbors hate the other half, because half of them were totally pro rabbit fur while you're pro squirrel fur.

You absolutely can do that and worse now, so while we've always had social media, we just simply never had anyone with enough control to make an entire society eat each other because of it's influence.

This is the better path forward.. That everyone just gets so sick of it that they drop it - I've actually seen a lot of that among my own friends over the last week (and we aren't from America even). But the right wingers will never drop it because it's their community and echo chamber, and that's where the further dangers to democracy come into play when they're all in the sandbox together without parents...