Look at long term teen suicide rates and you will see that suicide rates were quite high around 1990, and then rates dropped until about 2005, and are now on the rise again but have not yet reached 1990 levels (I think).
So, the author of this piece wants to make it look like suicides and self harm are on the rise because of social media, so where does he choose to start the charts? 2005.
Another way to frame this is that whatever factors were leading to teen suicides in the early 90s improved.
The question now is: are the same factors in play? The fact that rates were higher is not by itself a good reason to conclude that Haidt’s theory is wrong. The world has changed drastically, and a new upward trend is still a problem even if it never reaches previous highs. At a minimum, it indicates that something is going in the wrong direction after apparently going in the right direction for awhile.
Could the current trend be caused by the same factors in 1990s? Possible, but it’s also possible that social media is the problem in the same way airplanes cause global pandemics.
Even if the reasons are the old ones, we have a new operating environment to contend with.
Haidt isn't looking into what actually happened during these periods, he's just throwing his hands in the airs preaching "I can’t see a causal path linking X with Y outside of social media".
A lot of things have been happening all around the globe that were also fundamentally different from the past, including sensitivity to corruption and awareness of global warning, which younger generation could arguably be more prone to take seriously.
A lack of clear link can't just be brushed off as a proof of irrelevance of the other probable causes.
"I just can’t see a causal path by which America’s school shootings, lockdown drills, poverty, or racism caused girls in Australia to suddenly start self-harming or dying by suicide at the same time as so many American girls."
Do you really think Haidt is lazily missing a causal link here? Or is he maybe a thoughtful researcher who genuinely can't square this circle?
To be honest, no.
It's not lazy, the platform he's writing this has the tagline 'Using moral psychology to explain why so much is going wrong', so morality is at the center, and at the start of his essay he goes "I think it is a very good thing that alarms were rung about teen smoking, teen pregnancy, drunk driving, and the exposure of children to sex and violence on TV.", putting smoking, teen pregnancy and actual homicidal behavior at the same level as fictional sex and violence.
I think he's not even playing dumb, and purposefully chooses arguments he has no incentive to properly research, or straight omits the other probable causes he has knowledge of.
Did you miss the graphs showing the same trend in the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the Nordic countries?