The blame is almost entirely with the industries that created those products. They knew and know what they were doing. We didn't know. The public didn't know how harmful it was and could be.
For a long time, like 10 years ago, I thought people were just dumb, but it's like calling people dumb for smoking cigarettes in 1950, or whatever. And I also didn't really understand the dynamics, I saw people being shallow and dumb, but not the mechanics behind it. And I saw that they were validated by it. T
We were told it was ok, and not just that it was ok, but that it would democratcize communication, it would eradicate bad ideas, it would help progress across the world. It would be a salvation for our society. It was near evangelical.
This was the Obama era of technocratic expertise. To me, now, all that sounds insane, and laughable, but I remember that time, and I wasn't a evangelical about any of it, I remember the feeling of new IPhones, and Ipads, and Facebook, and IG. Not just the tech, but the mood in major urban/metro parts of the country.