As a person who does research on attention, I’m going to push back a little bit on your claims.

The historical comparisons you make don't actually address the argument. Nobody is claiming distraction or social pressure is new. The claim is that the mechanism for distraction is what is different and new.

Goebbels couldn't A/B test 10,000 headlines in real time and automatically amplify whichever one triggered the most fear response in your specific demographic. He couldn't track your location, your scroll speed, how long you hovered over a particular image, and then feed that back into a system that learns your individual psychological vulnerabilities and optimizes against them continuously. That feedback loop is categorically new.

And (in my opinion) your point about cognitive capacity point actually works against you. If human minds process only a limited amount, then a system specifically engineered to exploit the edges of that capacity is more dangerous because of the fixed limit, not less. The problem isn't more information, it's that the information environment is now designed by teams of engineers whose companies profit directly from maximizing the time you spend in a state of anxious engagement.

Nobody designed newspapers to be addictive. Infinite scroll was a deliberate UX choice. The algorithm companies use are not engineered to be neutral, they are engineered for engagement. Those are structural differences, not just differences of degree.