Short answers, pulled from the story.
Sons of Liberty follows two narratives set around New York City in 2007 and 2009. A massive offshore cleanup facility called the Big Shell is seized by terrorists demanding a ransom for the President of the United States. The story escalates into a conspiracy involving a shadow organization called the Patriots, who plan to control human thought through an artificial intelligence called GW.
Sons of Liberty was developed by Konami Computer Entertainment Japan and published by Konami. Hideo Kojima directed, produced, designed, and wrote the game. It was released for the PlayStation 2 in North America and Japan in November 2001 and in Europe in March 2002.
Hideo Kojima introduced Raiden to show Solid Snake from another character's perspective and to solve a writing problem: inserting basic gameplay tutorials into a veteran soldier's dialogue had become implausible after three mainline titles. Raiden was also designed to appeal to a wider audience, following tester feedback that players were tired of "only playing rugged old-looking guys in these games."
Combined worldwide sales of Sons of Liberty and its expanded edition, Substance, totaled 7.03 million units, making it the highest-selling game in the Metal Gear series at the time. In Japan alone, the game sold 400,000 units on its first day against 600,000 pre-orders.
Sons of Liberty explored themes of fake news, echo chambers, post-truth politics, and the engineering of information that became mainstream cultural concerns in the 2010s. In 2016, critics compared the game to post-truth politics and Facebook's curated News Feed. In March 2018, GamesRadar drew direct comparisons to the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data scandal and Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections.
Following the September 11 attacks, several scenes were removed from the game's Manhattan finale, including a sequence in which Arsenal Gear displaces the Statue of Liberty and a post-credits broadcast showing the Statue at Ellis Island. A scene of Solidus Snake shredding the New York Stock Exchange flag with his sword was also cut. The Japanese spelling of Raiden's name was changed from katakana to kanji because the phonetic katakana form resembled the name "Bin Laden" in Japanese.