What's you are not talking about in your equation is BROADCAST.
Everyone is a click away from broadcasting to the planet whatever is flitting through their head.
And everyone is encouraged to broadcast thanks to Zuckerberg & Co inventing the likes/clicks/views engagement feedback loop.
In the past, if one was ignorant (lacked knowledge or access to knowledge), stupid (lacked the capacity to understand knowledge even with access to it), misguided (had access to the knowledge with errors) the cost and energy required to broadcast was much higher. And there were only finite number of people and groups who could pull it off. That put an upper limit on how much energy society had to expend in dealing with issues thanks to broadcast of free speech.
Countering the issues takes energy. And that is finite.
It's not complicated to understand the change.
Take the best, most compassionate, patient, empathetic teacher you have and put him in a classroom with 10 misbehaving kids (all incentivized to misbehave) You will still see good teachers having a positive effect on all of them. Make it 30 misbehaving kids and things get trickier. Make it 500 and you will have the building burning down. Some magic process will have to generate more teachers to counteract the increase.
Social media and the news media have given us scale to Broadcast and rigged the game to prop up whoever/whatever gets engagement, without giving us a proportionate increase to respond to all the issues that also scale up.
We haven't invented empathy at scale yet. And it doesn't make sense to try while social media/news media rewards all kinds of bullshit. Likes/clicks/views counts need to be hidden otherwise the misbehaving kid gets mixed signals even if you apply empathy.