Earlier quoted context omitted.
Connecting people with their peers is most certainly not damaging-- any more than socializing in general. Facebook started off GREAT! I singed up almost as soon as it was available to the general public (remember it was just open to university students at first). At that time my timeline was basically text only and the content came from only my friends. It was like a fun online party -- not unlike online chat systems…
> Facebook started off GREAT! I'm glad early fb was a good experience for you, but studies have found that when fb was just opening to universities, lower grades and higher demand for mental health services would follow. https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-ill...
Full disclosure: one of my research areas in university was adolescents, and working exactly with these types of studies.
Anyways, the main theme which keeps coming back in this material is that the actual change begain in the EARLY 2010s, which is exactly what I'm saying. My assumption is that basically as social media started to focus more on visual content (photos and videos), people started getting weird feedback about how awesome everyone ELSE was, but you were not. Etc.
Keep in mind that teens are notoriously hard to study, and alot of this material is self reported. Many teens are basically always depressed and suicidal, and or become so for some small reasons such as the results of a report card or other such factor. This is why they are a higher risk group for this sort of stuff than say the average adult. At the same time you can't really shelter them too much, because it's the experiences they gain in adolescence that allow them to build their life toolkit.
Also keep in mind this is just US teens. The rest of the world is -- well -- the rest of the world, so the data cannot really be extrapolated to more than this country.