Putting aside concerns about overreach government powers, would ending social media as we know it really be a bad thing?
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* Broad reach - they are accessible to and used by a population broadly for public communication rather than a specific subset of the population or private communication.
* Optimized for engagement - Content is personalized and optimized for individual engagement. Compare this to a stream of content organized by time (email inbox) or basically time with minimal voting/decaying (HN)
* Feedback is quantifiable and visible - Likes, retweets, upvotes (ie, engagement metrics) are countable and displayed to users. I think this gets at something deep in the human psyche and encourages users to chase those metrics.
It turns out that in systems with all three (FB, Twitter), you create enormous echo chambers that only occasionally flare up into outrage when they inevitably leak to a broader audience. This is great for engagement but pretty self evidently bad for society.
Lots of sites fit somewhere on this spectrum (including HN and Stack Exchange) but have basic safeguards to prevent the worst types of behavior. But this is usually because they aren't profit motivated to slide all the way to one side on the three factors above.