Your perspective of “popular” is incredibly far off. Popular among people in your circle of socioeconomics and interests is not that same as popular among the general population.
quite the opposite. look at the almost exactly linear growth of the 2 biggest sites, fb and youtube. there is nothing special about the early 2010s, no acceleration in growth.
sites that myspace and orkut, which were already moribund by 2010, were popular under any normal definition eg alexa ranking. FB had 500mm users and a hollywood movie about it come out by 2010, a year or 2 later it had a billion users. She doesn't know what she's talking about. Sure it got steadily more popular, so what she means is "It was the early 2010s, and social media reached the point that it was replacing all social interactions..."