Social media does more harm than good

The harm narrative is mostly anecdotal. The most-cited harms — teen mental health, polarisation, attention erosion — survive sloppy methodology and don't survive better studies. Causality runs the other way as often as not: anxious teens use social media more because they're anxious, not the reverse. Polarisation predates Facebook by decades.

What social media unambiguously did do is collapse the cost of finding the other people who think like you. For a closeted teen in a rural town, a chronic-illness patient hunting for someone with the same diagnosis, a hobbyist with a niche interest, a dissident in an authoritarian state — that's not a side-effect. That's the product, and it's a moral good with no historical precedent.

The correct comparison isn't social media versus a romanticised pre-2007 world. It's social media versus the actually available alternatives — gatekept legacy media, geographic accident, and isolation. Against those, the picture changes.