French modernists were alarmed, inspired by newspaper's voracious dynamism

>In the 1860s, Charles Baudelaire bemoaned what we might now call doomscrolling: [...] The poet’s revulsion was widely shared in 19th-century France. Amid rapid increases in circulation, newspapers were depicted as a virus or narcotic responsible for collective neurosis, overexcitement and lowered productivity.

On one hand, one could think "oh, the current social network bashing is just the same doom and gloom reaction to more communication, it will pass".

On the other hand, if you know well the period, the newspapers of the time - which were closer to the tabloids of today, but worse - did a lot to stir hatred of foreigners, of Jews, of Poor, and contributed massively in causing wars, colonialism and pogroms.

Emile Zola published "J'accuse !" in a newspaper, but it was newspapers who stirred rabid antisemitism everywhere.

And on the grasping hand, one could think they were right - so instead of defending social media by pointing at the past and saying it's "just the same doom and gloom reaction to more communication, it will pass", or - conversely - instead of claiming social media is a new and uniquely bad thing, we could perhaps consider that their observations were valid then, and are even more valid now; that we've been going down the wrong road for the past 100+ years, and social media is merely an incremental worsening of a mistake made so long ago, we can't even conceptualize correcting it now.

But it wasn't continuously bad, or at least that's the impression I get. Yellow journalism reached it's heyday in the 1890's but started turning things around towards respectability in the 1900's.