That's an excellent point, to which I will add that humans are herd/pack animals, and if the community is dissolved it will need to be replaced with something to prop up that animal need. Enter social media. Yeah, this is "old man yells at clouds" territory, but the architecture of our social media tools is such that it allows one to yell and rant in a neighbor's face without repercussion. In person, the only people who would do that would be actual sociopaths, who then self-isolate and write long manifestos on typewriters and mail them to other weirdos. Give them the megaphone of social media, and now duplication/dissemination of their message of social misanthropy enters the public square. ... which bring us back to your anti-vaxxer analogy; here's the "maverick" who appeals to your sense of injustice and intellectual confusion over why life is so hard/complex. The two loonies find each other more easily and replace that missing sense of community with their neighbors, with a performative form of 2-dimensional "community" with a group of internet randos with unclear motivations/issues/diagnoses... Social media is The Problem, due to the architecture of the thing and its design to give the brief dopamine rush in place of the real animal-need of human connection to community. There's no hijacking here. There's just a fundamental dissolution of community and shared identity...
Thank you for putting that sentiment into those words. That really resonates and helps me frame something in my head. due to the architecture of the thing and its design to give the brief dopamine rush in place of the real animal-need of human connection to community.