Has social media created conditions in which liberal democracy can't survive?

Jonathan Haidt in The Atlantic (Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid -11th April 2022 - [£]) is very good on the whole issue of social media making democracy more stupid and unsustainable, and more to the point, it's a good all-purpose post on the impact of social media on Representative Democracy.

"In the first decade of the new century, social media was widely believed to be a boon to democracy. What dictator could impose his will on an interconnected citizenry? What regime could build a wall to keep out the internet?"

And... 

"It’s not just the waste of time and scarce attention that matters; it’s the continual chipping-away of trust. An autocracy can deploy propaganda or use fear to motivate the behaviors it desires, but a democracy depends on widely internalized acceptance of the legitimacy of rules, norms, and institutions. Blind and irrevocable trust in any particular individual or organization is never warranted. But when citizens lose trust in elected leaders, health authorities, the courts, the police, universities, and the integrity of elections, then every decision becomes contested; every election becomes a life-and-death struggle to save the country from the other side." 

And...

"The universal charge against people who disagree with this narrative is not “traitor”; it is “racist,” “transphobe,” “Karen,” or some related scarlet letter marking the perpetrator as one who hates or harms a marginalized group. The punishment that feels right for such crimes is not execution; it is public shaming and social death."

For me, one of the interesting points is the question of 'why are people stupid, all of a sudden?'

I'd argue that we are all quite stupid most of the time, but social media has made it evident, aggregated it, and created conditions which (as I predicted back in 2004) were damaging to Representative Democracy - the only real success story of the democratic west. Many of the authoritarian currents on the crude-populist left can be explained by a political school of thought that had a priesthood, of sorts, and one that understood which paths (e.g., identity) had dragons waiting on them. That priesthood has now been overwhelmed by low-stakes day-trippers - the political hobbyists.