Your mistake is in calling the Internet a "passive actor." The whole problem is that it's the first interactive medium we have. As such, we do not interact with it the same way we interact with television or radio.
I don't think the internet is original in any way... it's disease is just spread more broadly more quickly. Prior to the web we had crazy zines... The Desert Rat, and the weird Jack Chick treatises, and punk rock mags. And flyers up on telephone poles, espousing crazy. But those were limited due to the distribution medium costing money. (Copies, postage, etc.) Prior to the web we had scam/spam phone calls. People calling at all hours of the day and night and trying to sell scams or products. The internet just makes those 'calls' almost zero cost. The internet has not presented us with new problems, as far as I can tell. Just hyper-scaled versions of our old problems... ... which all stem from most humans just simply being dicks.
Yeah sorry, I disagree. Crazy zines had a production and distribution cost. This was a barrier to entry that incentivized those who were willing to put in the effort and money to get their ideas across. They were also asymmetrical: there was information, it had to be sought out, it was consumed without considering the opinion of anyone but your close and immediate friends, and if you wished to interact with it you had to type something up, put it in the mail and hope for a response some day. Now we have "sub-tweets" where the tall dude from That '70s Show can put your angry disagreement with him in front of eighteen million people instantaneously. And what about mistakes? You sleep with the wrong guy. He tapes it. There's a VHS tape wandering around school that's awful and someone's going to get in trouble. Now? Now you sleep with the wrong guy and you're 8m views on Youporn by morning. Videos? There were channels, and they were run by large organizations, and they were held to standards by the government, and it took a lot of money and effort to get content on them. Reading Rainbow was canceled because it didn't have the ratings to scare up two million dollars a season. At less than 200,000 viewers per episode and 155 episodes, Reading Rainbow is at about 31 million "views." If you were to go look up "finger family" (you could, but you shouldn't - you really, really shouldn't) on Youtube you can find two videos with over a billion views each. And every time you watch Finger Family anything, you go down a bizarre rabbit hole of barely marginal content designed to please the algorithm. You and your buddies used to steal dad's beer and argue about whether or not Alice Cooper actually appeared on The Muppet Show. After all, there was no way to know. Now? Now you pass around deepfaked videos of Natalie Portman on Discord and argue about whether it's shooped I can tell by the pixels without any of you even knowing what each other look like. It's a new problem. We used to deal with social issues socially. Now we do it through this bizarre media where none of us are human. And it's not the same.