French media theorist Jean Baudrillard hypothesized in a 1980 essay titled „The Implosion of Meaning in the Media and the Implosion of the Social in the Masses“ that modern communication technologies are set up to facilitate as much discussion and interaction among the populace as possible—this much is self-evident in the case of social media like Twitter and Facebook—but with an ulterior motive, or at least overriding side effect: widespread information collection and the eventual silencing of the masses.