Brilliant. Agree with every word.

I would add just this - as you say, no algorithm is responsible for conspiratorial thinking,

Instead, I believe that ubiquitous access to the firehose of information that is the Internet has overall weakened our mental health, both individually and as a group, opening us up to a host of infectious mental illnesses, of which conspiratorial thinking is only one.

Neil Postman anticipated it but had no way to known that bandwidth of all types could be cranked up by orders of magnitude in just one generation.