If social relationships cannot be maintained without social media, I have no doubt, it is the wrong social relationships "maintained".
Network effects just don't work like this. I suspect thinking that they do is related to the kinds of friendships the commenter has - small, intense, long term group friendships; and proximity friendships.
Personally I don't have the social capital to pull the dozens of people I keep in regular contact with off their preferred platform and into a new one. Very few people do. And I value those relationships far more than I hate the platforms that maintain them.
> If social relationships cannot be maintained without social media, I have no doubt, it is the wrong social relationships "maintained".
This is a value judgement, and not an argument. I have strong relationships with friends and former partners, as well as family, that I've maintained for decades through platforms like messenger - which is awful but ubiquitous - with real people who live across the world. We do meet when possible, but it's often years apart, and there's no one 'core group'. These are real world, profound friendships with people I met in person, lived or worked or studied with for years and care about.
I completely agree with the characterisation of the harms wrought by social media. But prior to social media, more than a very few distant friendships were all but impossible to maintain. And when you lost contact with an old friend, you could never be quite certain if they had lost interest, were too busy, or had perhaps died or suffered some great setback in life.
Value judgements are the ultimate arguments. In the end, nothing else matters aside from the kind of values we want to uphold.
Moreover - what you're describing is virtue ethics, which is only one of many ethical systems. Hold hard to your values and be evaluated based on your adherence to them. Personally I'm more of a soft utilitarian - it's the results of my decisions that matter, not how they adhere to an abstract value. But we all fight the chaos in our own way.
All of the above can (and have) yield in order to uphold some values, including the ultimate sacrificing of one's life (much less health or social contacts).
Plus, utilitarians have virtue ethics too. They just consider utility the virtue to uphold, downstream from that decision it's not different than plain old virtue ethics. After all the utility can only ultimately be judged by a value judgement (what we consider of higher utility). There's no neutral raw utility without a desired (value judgement) end result.
I'm a person who abstains from social media. My family has not. They can contact me individually, and some do infrequently, but they complain that I'm extra work and the rest of my family is more connected because they post content once and everybody sees it. So, I'm missing out on the healthy part of social media -- as anti-social-media as I am, I must acknowledge that there is some good to it. Your insistence that my family is the "wrong social relationship" to maintain is missing the baby for the bathwater.
This is one result...
https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/surgeon-general-soci...
On the other hand, the problem is with "everyone for themselves" solutions is that they're not enough to address an issue that affects you (and society in general in systemic ways) even if you personaly don't use the medium.
You don't need to care about something for it to affect you. Do you need a citation for this too?
I'm claiming (actually merely stating, this is more like "water is wet" that some claim that needs support, it's almost a tautology) that systemic/social effects (what most people do, even if you don't do them) affect people in a society even if they don't participate.
Specially that the majority people using social media also affects people not using them. Because even if you dont use them, your friends, kids, relatives, colleages, etc, do.
The effect ranges from people simple things like people driving the car in the same roads as you while checking their feed, people staring at their screens when you go out with them, to friends/spouses/relatives/colleagues/kids being addicted, depressed, manipulated, misinformed, and generally affected in multiple ways by social media in many ways that then brush of to you (except if you live in a desert), to others expecting you to be participating there and treating you weirdly if you don't, and several other ways besides.
It's the same way for many other things that are seemingly "individual" choice. You might not care about alcohol or drugs for example, but if somebody in your circle does, or even someone you have the misfortune to meet, it can just as well affect you (or their friends, relatives, violent crime rates, the health system, road safety, etc.).
Mobile service providers outsourced their customer "service" to open forums.
Mailing lists have been replaced by "Discourse" or unsearchable Telegram and Gitter channels. Nothing has a history any longer.
I get your grief with Mailing lists though. The forced move from lists to web forums was pretty much a downer for me. Actually, I left every community which did that. I am too old to browser a bunch of web forums each day. If the new kids like that, let 'em play with eachother...