I'm not on any side in this particular argument, but there are thousands of things we do/eat/experience every day which hurt us and we have no idea.

this clearly meets the threshold, though. i don't know a single person who has used social media that considers it not-harmful overall, mostly it's a justified use of "i need it for x so i have to put up with the downsides"

it just seems really silly to me to walk into this thread about how Facebook internally believes they're doing harm, and reply to a statement about how the harmed demographic feels they're being harmed, in the context of well-documented ways that harm occurs and what kind of effects it has, with a statement doubting the harm actually exists and questioning the self-reported experience of harm

The long term, creeping effects of medium (not very heavy) air pollution are incredible. They sneak up on you so slowly, few rational people can understand when it begins to affect your health in measurable ways.

People can identify things hurting them, but not always correctly. But people also can blame personal failings on external sources easily as well.

It’s like asking why studies using self-reported survey numbers on penis sizes cannot be treated as the ultimate truth, despite adults surely being able to use a measurement tape or a ruler. There is a reason for why the average numbers on all those studies using self-reported numbers are always at least one standard deviation larger than the average numbers obtained from a study that wasn’t just a self-reported survey.