“I have heard the street, as well as noted rabbonim and roshei yeshivos claim that the internet is the cause for today’s OTD population. This is clearly false.”
That sentence sounds inappropriate to me. You don’t say “Noted Rabbanim and Roshei Yeshiva say….” and then follow it with “that is clearly false”.
It also makes no sense. If the Rabbanim say it, it can’t be “clearly false”. The fact that something is clear to you but not to Rabbanim makes it “clearly false”? That is inappropriate and illogical and kind of gaavadik. If the Rabbanim are in fact saying something that appears to you to be clearly false, maybe you should try to figure out why they are saying something that seems to be clearly false. Maybe they know more than the average person does. Or maybe they didn’t mean what you thought they meant.
In terms of your assertion that it is clearly false because kids were going OTD before the Internet, it may be a question of numbers. There have probably been kids going off since the world was created, but the question is how many. There seems to have been an explosion in recent years, so it can be because of the Internet. I did hear recently from someone in the field that what is happening today is that as a result of the Internet, kids go from at-risk to OTD much faster (because of the online support and encouragement).
Btw, I am just responding to your statements as you made them. Personally, I don’t think that the Rabbanim are saying that Internet is the only cause of kids going OTD. The Rabbanim that I know that are dealing with the issue are clearly aware that there are many factors and that is not the factor they are targeting.
Perhaps the comments you heard were in the context of giving mussar about internet and they were just pointing out that there are kids who go OTD because of it (and not that it’s the only cause).