> I fail to see how what we have now is inherently worse...especially for cultural minorities. Exploiting psychological weakness to keep people's attention goes back a long, long way. That's never going away
The "attack surface", so to speak, is larger with individualized content consumption. With TV at max we have N channels that can broadcast N different viewpoints with the intention to rile M people up, at most in N different ways. Youtube can rile M people up in M different ways. M is orders of magnitude larger than N.
There is an economical model somewhat analogous to this; price discrimination. Charging the absolute highest price every individual consumer would individually pay yields the absolute maximum profit. In contrast, having a visible price tag that makes everyone pay the same price leaves a lot of those profits on the table. In youtube's case, riling everyone up individually with their particularized content maximizes the engagement. Trying to rile groups of people with the same content doesn't yield the same engagement.
> There would have to be evidence of mental "obesity" that somehow began with social media and did not exist before.
You're right, references to information obesity goes back to Baudrillard. That said keep in mind absence of evidence does not mean evidence of absence, even if our grandparents were complaining about a similar phenomena it doesn't mean our intuition about it is as inflated nor the phenomenon are in comparable scales. Not only that, credibility of past grievances go both ways; it took a long while to get cigarettes classified properly carcinogenic.
As for hard evidence, we could use non-work screen time as a proxy, which increases especially in younger demographics. It is still not a perfect comparison because different screens have different information densities and user interaction modalities.
As an indirect evidence I would suggest an increase in intensity and multi-valency of culture wars.
Current phase of the internet is at best a decade old, so there is also going to be an availability bias when looking for evidence.
I also couldn't help noticing you working in high profile media companies like Disney and Twitch in the past, I don't think you would assert it wouldn't ever affect your neutrality on this matter.