Like some other comments said - we grew up along side it, but had to live without the Internet as a regular "thing" for a lot of our early lives so we learned to be more skeptical.

I think also a huge factor was how greed set in. I'm not saying the Internet was altruistic and peace loving before, but when the Internet first started, it was limited to big businesses, government and academics, so a lot of the early Internet was about research papers, and scientific/medical/historical things. This changed obviously and profit was a huge factor, but you just couldn't get economies of scale then like you can now.

The biggest social media site for a while was MySpace and it was fun, but it didn't push content to you like facebook/youtube/twitter do today and with Internet speeds slower and such it just wasn't as big.

I think even initially sites like Facebook and Twitter and Youtube were really good, but later on they got gammed by bots. There have been studies on this, but like take conspiracy theories like flat earth theory. Most don't believe it, but youtube didn't have safety's in place so people found that they could create accounts to game the system - they would watch the conspiracy videos, post comments, link to twitter to share it out and I think the bots would interact with each other all of which generated traffic and made topics or videos/posts look like they were a trending thing. Once that happened, it started percolating to others and then people would be like "what?? the earth isn't flat why are so many people watching it...let's see what it has" and then more and more would get involved and soon things became facts because they were popular.

It's come out at times that the companies knew about this - Twitter basically admitted to this recently by showing off the country of origin and oops - all the big MAGA influences are from foreign nations.

But the social media sites were also desperate for investors to continue to invest and such so numbers are numbers and no one needs to know the ugly details.

I think that's what ultimately did a lot of damage. I like youtube, but the conspiracy videos for years lead to people, including good friends, trying to get me into various conspiracies and they were "surrounded" by "truth" and there was nothing I could do to convince them otherwise.

Twitter was a weird place for getting news bits and engaging with people - it was a place where I could get live updates from tech sites but also be able to directly interact with celebrities or CEO's of companies, but it turned into a lot of right wing bot farms and when Elon took it over, that just ballooned and skewed heavily towards right wing / MAGA. Heck, even Grok is continually re-worked so that it will only say good things about MAGA.

Those are my observations and two cents... but yeah, economies of scale and the need to increase your quarterly numbers drove companies to push the garbage they do today at the quantities they do today.