[wffurr]

Social media is more like the printing press than any of those things. It radically changed the economics of distributing information. The printing press brought down the Catholic church and the Kings of Europe. The disruption caused by social media and disintermediated free distribution is just getting started.

[krige]

You may notice that both the european kings and the church coexisted with the printing press for centuries. No, what did the kings in was the great war, and what broke the Catholic Church's stranglehold on Europe (because it's still around and hardly powerless) was either the french revolution or the great war again.

[TFNA]

Notice much Catholic Church power in Northern Germany and the Nordic countries? The printing press was a huge part of how Northern Europe went so hard for Lutheranism that Catholicism became a vague folk memory. Around the same time, Great Britain and the Netherlands became mostly Protestant, and even France had a substantial Protestant community before the Counter-Reformation was set on it. This is what the OP was talking about.