None of the things you list are unique to social media. They all existed before the rise of the socials. Many of them existed before the internet.

This is like saying the written word existed before the printing press. It certainly did, but technology has fundamentally changed its impact.

Yes, but the increased availability of such things around the globe and across social strata is unparalleled.

Availability and immediacy, too. What does it mean when information becomes available to a broad swath of the population immediately after it comes into existence? For instance, we're already witnessing the effects of speedy dissemination of dis- and misinformation.

Nonsense. Social media and the sensational, vain culture it has inculcated it is entirely damaging and without value. It is _only_ revolutionary and disparages any prior merit and censure without reason. It is a denial of service on reason and experience claiming precedence and priority without any historical context.

I think you have the causation exactly backwards - the vain culture is what gave rise to social media. Japanese "social media" including forums and image boards are biased towards being nonentity as possible. Famous cat owners make efforts to be non-entity as possible compared to US ones often involving owner presence even if just dangling a toy and talking to the cat.

Japan sure as hell isn't perfect socially but they demonstrate that the source of social problems may be found in the mirror collectively and not in new technology.

No. Entrepreneurs understood our cultures tendency towards vanity, self reflective and voyeuristic exhibition, and created businesses based on this. Social media was the exploitation and exaggeration of that vanity. What it is now is a huge business and opportunity for marketing and social control.

> From providing self estem from a different source from the local.

The article explicitly covers this and shows a net negative. So saying there are positive effects isn’t very helpful as any gains are more than offset by negatives.

I think your argument is better through quantification. As I don’t think anyone is making the case that social media doesn’t have any benefits at all, the argument is that the negatives outweigh the benefits.

Of course, I think it’s easier to quantify the negatives than positives. How do I quantify the positive effect that offsets the probably correlated increase in preteen girl hospitalizations? [0]

[0] sorry trying to find the easiest citation for the graph in Lukiakoff and Haidt’s book Coddling of America’s Youth [1] https://livingonparr.wixsite.com/livingonparr/single-post/20...

[1] https://www.thecoddling.com/

To put a finer point on one of yours, social media made very obvious the existence of violence against racial and ethnic minorities by law enforcement, among other social ills.

It's hard and slow work to gain populist support for socially progressive policy. We wouldn't be talking about this stuff were it not for the truths presented to us by the people it affects most profoundly.

Connecting those profiles to real life names has the upside of enabling those teenagers to stay in touch with old friends when everyone moves around as adults

(and I wouldn't say the social networks where profiles don't need to be connected to real names are necessarily any better)

I don't see what real life names have to do with keeping in touch. I've kept in touch with people for 15+ years using IRC nicknames. In a few cases I don't know the other person's real name at all.

Sure people can change their nicknames, but people change their real names too. I've gone by three different 'real' names throughout my life. That may not be super common, but people getting married and changing their name at least once is certainly not rare. The way I see it, a 'real' name is only more real than the others insofar as it's the name the government uses for you. But that sort of realness isn't relevant for social purposes. For social purposes, the 'realest' name is the name people call you.

I mean "here's all the people you went to school with" was literally Facebook's raison d'etre. If I was relying on stored phone numbers or email addresses I'd be a lot less likely to be in touch with some of them (including those whose numbers I still have!)

Sure, it's possible to stay in touch with a long list of monikers and sometimes even not much more difficult, but (going back to the OP I responded to) it's possible and often no more difficult to ruin people's lives across pseudonymous services too. Lack of real name is probably more of an impediment to the casually interested old friend than the concerted hate campaign.

It's a valid point and I have found value in looking up past friends on facebook.

I'm not sure a teenager has the same value. Anyone under 18 shouldn't have real identifying names them.

When facebook came out you had people isolated into networks of schools. Those structures provided better protections and freedom. The transition to fully public with forced real names made facebook into something not for kids but great for older folks.

And for many, the ego had increased exponentially with the attention gathered.