This. The cost of going on Internet used to be quite high, and requires some skills and knowledge. Nowadays anyone can troll, and they get repeated by other trolls, the percentage of it "may" be the same ( although I doubt it ), but the "absolute" number of those are much much higher.
Remember before the iPhone, the internet was a much smaller place, and accessed mostly in front of a computer. With Smartphone you now have 4.5 Billion Internet user all using it at any time of the day. The Internet is also much faster. Creating content is easier. We are may be 10 - 100x more in online content consumption then in the 2000s.
And I agree this is not US only.
So yes it is definitely a social AND psychological problem. Not a technical one, no blockchain, Distributed Social Media, Machine Learning, new AI, Cloud, Servless, (WhatEver)aaS etc will solve it.
Remember before the iPhone, the internet was a much smaller place, and accessed mostly in front of a computer. With Smartphone you now have 4.5 Billion Internet user all using it at any time of the day. The Internet is also much faster. Creating content is easier. We are may be 10 - 100x more in online content consumption then in the 2000s.
And I agree this is not US only.
So yes it is definitely a social AND psychological problem. Not a technical one, no blockchain, Distributed Social Media, Machine Learning, new AI, Cloud, Servless, (WhatEver)aaS etc will solve it.