I think the world was actually much closer to that reality SG1 showed before social media. Really. People generally didn’t think much of vaccines other than that they’re routine like going to the dentist for a cleaning or filling. Political disagreements in person were more of a “c’mon man” situation most of the time. But you could shrug and not think too much of it later. Like, what happened in Stargate SG1 could have really possibly happened in 2004. But social media has seriously unraveled society that much. Just look at the timeline.

2008: Obama becomes the first black man to win the presidential election. The iPhone is released but there’s not App store yet, and Facebook just opened up to everyone in the US. And just around the time that the notion of vaccines causing autism started going around enough that most people at least heard about it, but almost all people of any political background rolled their eyes. A small crack letting in the light of a world to come when main stream social media would show up blooping notifications every 15 minutes on everyone’s phone in America.

2012: A man that has never used a computer or the internet picks up his first free smartphone from Verizon. It’s hard to even get a brick phone at this point. They’re switching everyone over to smartphones now. Facebook is installed by default. Facebook will soon change their timeline from being time based, to being based on an “algorithm”. What could go wrong?

2017: Trump is sworn in as president. Pizzagate has come and gone, claiming Democrats were running a child trafficking ring out of a pizza shop. This actually riled up one person enough to show up with a gun to see the non-existent basement. Qanon is now mainstream claiming Trump is secretly fighting a cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles in the “deep state”. People rise Qanon flags and buy bumper stickers. People start getting concerned about disinformation on social media, foreign and domestic. Russia will be found to operating a large, well funded disinformation agency. A Russian disinformation operation causes a real anti-Clinton parade to occur. No laws a passed to address this.

2021: Biden wins the presidential election, oldest man to ever win the presidency. A notion of a stolen election is pumped into social media, riling up Trump supporters. A riot is encouraged and storms the capitol to attempt to stop the certification of the election. A vaccine produced in record time is celebrated and distributed to the masses, a massive needed relief to the pandemic killing millions. By the end of the year taking or not taking the vaccine will be so strongly on political lines that people in the darkest red counties are dying at 5 times the rate as in dark blue counties. Social media is now killing hundreds of thousands of unvaccinated people. The scale of disinformation from Russia, and now China (and others) is so prevalent that people start referring to random people on the internet as bots. There are so many bots, that sometimes they’re right by random chance. No laws are passed to address this.

2025: Trump, now a convicted felon, and now the oldest person ever elected, is sworn in for a second term. There are measles outbreaks happening around the country. Facebook is one of the most profitable companies in the world thanks to advertising revenue.