One of @rabble 's recent podcast guests was making an interesting point that some of the original objections to the printing press, aside from the loss of control of the Papacy as the sole source of Truth, was that trust moved from social networks to intellectual authorities.
E.g. "I've been buying cheese from Jörg at the market for 10 years, I trust him more than some pamphlet saying the Plague is coming."
The advent of social media, for better or worse, has sort of reversed this dynamic.