That's called social anxiety, just FYI.
And yeah, it's plausible that people which have social anxiety are more prone to overusing social media etc.
It's tough, but what actually works for me now, is giving other people the respect and privacy they need, by not thinking about how they think. You'd be surprised how much extra thinking time you have for everything else just by cutting your thoughts off at that line.
Still, there are no rules yet for empathy, and my mind can still get panicky in crowds, and there is the belief that I will be perpetually socially naive and subject to social manipulation. But I think it's better than hiding in the corner of a room, staring at the floor, maybe.
I do not really like social media. I like interesting conversations that stimulate me intellectually.
What works is to pick a path, any path, and look in the direction of that path. That is a sufficient signal for all parties to self-organize and avoid collision, even at high speeds and density of people. In other words, leading lowers the cost of following.
Even if one could mind-read, one may not like what one perceives. But humans are adaptable and can often reciprocate. If one's actions assume/imply positive intent, one can motivate positive reciprocity and reduce/avoid the cost of perceiving intent.
I like my desk and being socially awkward.
It's pretty explicit that they're not claiming causality.
Couldn't it just be that, uh, Facebook is kinda boring? Or, as the article mentions, that "depressed feelings and lots of time on Facebook [...] go hand in hand," in other words, lonely/isolated people habitually look for connection on social media, but the kinds of communication that happen there are not very interesting or loneliness-assuaging.
David Foster Wallace's 1993 essay "E Unibus Pluram" describes a similar tendency but with television as the substituting technology:
"Every lonely human I know watches way more than the average U.S. six hours a day. The lonely, like the fictional, love one-way watching. For lonely people are usually lonely not because of hideous deformity or odor or obnoxiousness—in fact there exist today social and support groups for persons with precisely these features. Lonely people tend rather to be lonely because they decline to bear the emotional costs associated with being around other humans. They are allergic to people. People affect them too strongly. Let's call the average U.S. lonely person Joe Briefcase. Joe Briefcase just loathes the strain of the self-consciousness which so oddly seems to appear only when other real human beings are around, staring, their human sense-antennae abristle. Joe B. fears how he might appear to watchers. He sits out the stressful U.S. game of appearance poker.
"But lonely people, home, alone, still crave sights and scenes. Hence television. Joe can stare at Them, on the screen; They remain blind to Joe. It's almost like voyeurism."