> Any fundamentalist religious community

For starters, wasn't the USA founded by, ehh.. how shall I say it tactically, very religious people?

Considering the tech companies kissing Trump's ring start of Jan 2025, we might well be going that way. I mean, it is no secret if you read Project 2025 or a decent summary of it.

Either way, if we ignore all that (too 'political'), it is being used today for amplification of (bogus) information and to influence our democratic processes. Social media is a propaganda tool in the hands of the wrong people.

East Germany is an interesting example, as it is relatively recent. There was mass surveillance in such dictatorship. People's homes were tapped, informants, all the post was opened, read and closed. About one third of the East German population worked for the East German government. This is very inefficient if you think about it. If they had more surveillance tools at their disposal, they'd also need more automation/computers/ML to aid with said surveillance.

In the same vein, something as simple as Bluetooth has been used for P2P messaging between smartphones in mass demonstrations. Think about the revolutions in countries such as Ukraine, Egypt, and many other in that region.

I agree by and large with the thrust of what you're saying, but

> wasn't the USA founded by... very religious people?

The USA was founded by a mix of people religiously, but many of them were essentially deists. That is, not outright atheists but the closest thing you could admit publicly at the time. It's true that some of them were Christians, like John Jay. Some of them, like Jefferson, retained some Christian belief but rejected many of the core Christian beliefs. Jefferson even literally cut much of Jesus out of the bible. Most of them were committed to religious freedom, and that freedom successfully became the very first enumerated right in the Bill of Rights of the Constitution. Relative to the standards of the time, I think the USA was founded by remarkably secular people.

You may be thinking of the Puritans who founded an American colony a century before the founding of the USA. They still remained a powerful community locally during the founding, but the founders of the USA (as we normally consider them) were not Puritans.

The secular roots of the country are written into the Constitution, but the country gradually Christianized over the years. For example, adding "In God We Trust" in the 1860s and adopting it as an official motto in the 1950s.

But at any rate, I agree if your point is that (consistent with my point above) widespread social media in a Puritan colony or similar would have been unpleasant. In literature, the Scarlet Letter and the Crucible raise a similar point.