I am so *incredibly* sick of people just randomly blaming everything they don’t like on the internet - or, worse yet, just mindlessly scaremongering about the internet and its “effect on society” without the slightest idea of the actual precedents there are in history for the internet.
A really solid example is the invention and popularisation of the moveable-type printing press in the early modern period. Its effect on mass communication and the democratisation of knowledge and communication is very comparable.
It’s pretty reasonable to say that the main reason the Protestant Reformation happened when it did was because Martin Luther, unlike, say, William Wytcliffe, a 14th century English proto-Protestant, had access to the printing press and could put out pamphlets, meaning his evolving ideas could reach a potentially huge - and *very interested* - mass audience.
This wasn’t even limited by literacy rates, which were growing at the time, because there was also a huge culture of reading out loud and debating in most urban centres at the time, particularly in Germany and the Low Countries. And, given how quick and easy pamphlets were to print and distribute, it didn’t take long for pamphleteering wars to break out. I entirely stopped giving any credence to people claiming the internet was causing “the death of civility in society” after I read one of Thomas More’s (yes, the martyr *Saint* Thomas More, who is somehow *still* regarded as a stately and dignified man of conscience) flame war replies to Luther where he said “your shitty mouth, truly the shit-pool of all shit, all the muck which your damnable rottenness has vomited up”.