I wish to quibble with you on this as there is a love/hate relationship between the conventional media and social media.

The mainstream media have several sources, including the press releases that get sent to them, the newswires they get their main news from and social media.

In the UK the press, in particular, the BBC, were early adopters of Twitter. Most of the population would not have heard of it had it not been for the journalists at the BBC. The journalists thought it was the best thing since the invention of the printing press. Latterly Instagram has become an equally useful source to them and, since Twitter became X, there is less copying and pasting tweets.

The current U.S. President seems capable of dictatorship via social media, so following his messages on social media is what the press do. I doubt any journalist has been on whitehouse.gov for a long time, the regular web and regular sources have been demoted.

Unfortunately most of what people understand as "social media" is not decentralized, and most of the biggest names on Substack in particular come directly out of "traditional media", which is exactly why it's not a real alternative. Substack is just another newspaper except now readers have to pay for every section they want to read.

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I'm struggling to understand your point, especially since the conclusion you posit is rather glib and dismissive.

Net-negative is not quantifiable. But it is definitely qualifiable.

I don't think you have to think of things in terms of "hate it more than I like it" when you have actual examples on social media of children posting self-harm and suicide, hooliganism and outright crimes posted for viewership, blatant misinformation proliferation, and the unbelievable broad and deep affect powerful entities can have on public information/opinion through SM.

I think we can agree all of these are bad, and a net-negative, without needing any mathematic rigor.

Weren’t you, in your initial post, suspicious that the research process was settling on a pessimistic consensus view? Figuring that, because most every formal study is coming up negative (or “no effect supported”), it must be that the research is selective and designed to manipulate? And that a phenomenon can’t exhibit a diversity of uniformly bad effects without “an underlying reason that has been left unstated and unproven”?

I don’t know how I’d state or prove a single underlying reason why most vices are attractive-while-corrosive and still, on the whole, bad. It feels like priests and philosophers have tried for the whole human era to articulate a unified theory of exactly why, for example, “vanity is bad”. But I’m still comfortable saying gambling feels good and breaks material security, lust feels good and breaks contentment (and sometimes relationships), and social media feels good and breaks spirits.

I certainly agree that “social media” feels uncomfortably imprecise as a category—shorthand for individualized feeds, incentives toward vain behavior, gambling-like reinforcement, ephemerality over structure, decontextualization, disindividuation, and so on; as well as potentially nice things like “seeing mom’s vacation pics.”

If we were to accept that social media in its modern form, like other vices, “feels good in the short term and selectively stokes one’s ego,” would that be enough of a positive side to accept the possibility for uniformly negative long-run effects? For that matter, and this is very possible—is there a substantial body of research drawing positive conclusions that I’m not familiar with?

> The appropriate place to find out what is and isn't true is research. Do research, write papers, discuss results, resolve contradictions in findings, reach consensus.

Few hot-button social issues are resolved via research, and I'm not sure they should be. On many divisive issues in social sciences, having a PhD doesn't shield you from working back from what you think the outcome ought to be, so political preferences become a pretty reliable predictor of published results. The consensus you get that way can be pretty shoddy too.

More importantly, a lot of it involves complex moral judgments that can't really be reduced to formulas. For example, let's say that on average, social media doesn't make teen suicides significantly more frequent. But are OK with any number of teens killing themselves because of Instagram? Many people might categorically reject this for reasons that can't be dissected in utilitarian terms. That's just humanity.

> The media should not be deciding what is true, they should be reporting what they see.

Largely I don't think the media has been dictating anything. They've just been reporting on the growing body of evidence showing that social media is harmful.

What you'd call "trial by media" is just spreading awareness and discussion of the evidence we have so far which seems like a very good thing. Social media moves faster than scientific consensus, and there's a long history of industry doing everything they can to slow that process down and muddy the waters. We've seen facebook doing exactly that already by burying child safety research.

A decade or more of "Do thing, say nothing" is not a sound strategy when the alternative is letting the public know about the existing research we have showing real harms and letting them decide for themselves what steps to take on an individual level and what concerns to bring to their representatives who could decide policy to mitigate those harms or even dedicate funding to further study them.

There's plenty of research. Plenty. None of it is positive.

Summaries with links here. https://socialmediavictims.org/effects-of-social-media/

It's really not hard to confirm this.

The problem isn't that "building political momentum is more important than accuracy", it's that social media is a huge global industry that pumps out psychological, emotional, and political pollution.

And like all major polluters, it has a very strong interest in denying what it's doing.