I believe that many of you commenting here about the terrible dangers of social media's addictiveness and so forth more likely than not simply live in a bubble where you yourselves and the circles of people around you are unusually addicted to it.
I can spend a few minutes on Facebook or Instagram a few times a day and that's it, no problem leaving and few problems with self image anxiety because of some influenciar or other people's profiles. Most of my friends are more or less similar, and if they use their own social media profiles for anything more heavily, it's because of work obligations, but outside of those obligations, they simply don't qualify as addicted.
Of course, my own story may be coming from a different kind of bubble of its own, and after all it's no more than an anecdote, but I'd love to see a concrete, empirical study that shows just how many people out of a given population (broken down by age or demographic groups maybe) really do get emotionally crushed by social media addiction, and how many people are more or less casual about using it and don't take it too seriously. The harping and woeful lamenting that I keep seeing on HN (ironically full of people who benefited financially from and helped facilitate this very technology in their careers) about how social networks are creating an emotional wasteland is no substitute for real data.
All the above aside, the big social networks are indeed fully, empirically worthy of criticism for their endlessly parasitical scrounging for personal data and perpetual monetized surveillance of every person they can push into "engagement". This however doesn't necessarily mean that they're succeeding as much as some like to think at the mass emotional manipulation aspect. The two things need not strongly correlate.
After all, as many other seemingly contradictory comments on this same site have noted in the past, much of the ad and content suggestions that sites like FB or Insta push on people are often laughably off the mark at guessing interest or preference, yet at the same time, these same faulty algorithms somehow supposedly devastate the self images and belief systems of millions of people? So, which is it? It could be both, but that seems rather doubtful.