I think you're completely right, and I think social media is still the contributing factor. Not the concept of social media in itself. But the way current imple

I think you're completely right, and I think social media is still the contributing factor. Not the concept of social media in itself. But the way current implementations work, they are incentivised to be addictive, to increase the amount of ads viewed, and to provide more data to be sold for a profit(see Campbell's Law for the relevant sociology work here. If all you're maximizing is "engagement", you'll have lots of it, at the cost of everything else). Therefore, the things you describe are emergent effects of a platform whose custodians have incentives fundamentally misaligned with the well-being of the platform's users.