But at this point, we also have a separate category of things that pretty much on their own are having a negative effect on society. That would be things like TikTok (including Instagram Reels, and Youtube Shorts).
The fact that they're not trying to come up with a new UI paradigm, or discovery mechanism is very telling. They keep focusing on semi-random swipe-directed discovery, and that tells me they're not interested in making the best content available to you as the interested-consumer. They want you wasting time and generating N-counts of redundant ad views/impressions/things before finding that one thing you wanted or might find interesting.
Youtube is probably the best at at-least trying to not force you to swipe (when watching normal videos). But even there, we can see how much people complain about "The Feed" or "The Algorithm". With all of Google's money and effort, they couldn't (or chose not to) find a better way at matching viewers with good content.
It wasn’t the gutting of the educational system, that’s far too simple an explanation.
Then again, we lost that battle with misogynistic, language-rotting, and violent rap music because we were too worried about being called racists, so there might not be hope we'll do better this time around.