Assuming that we'll come to our senses, I think well be looking back at social media, in it's current form, the same way we now look at the Victorians using opium as cough medicine. It works, but holy shit are you doing it wrong.

This is excessively reductive.

Media (social or otherwise) is a force multiplier. Ultimately it is the sensory, feedback, and control mechanism for a social system. And yes, if you change the informational behaviour of a system you fundamentally change that system's behaviour, there are still other factors at play.

Corruption, inequality, biases (themselves often reinforced through media, yes), environment, and various other endogenous and exogenous factors also come in to play. I'd also call in other informational elements, including widespread surveillance systems and AI, which operate in at least part outside the scope of social media.

That social media exacerbates many of our present problems I'd agree to. That it's fundamental to all of them, not so much.

I'd say 'social problems', but otherwise entirely true.

One of the strangest things I find is that people will spend serious money to buy a house somewhere they don't have to be exposed to the great unwashed yet will happily expose their brains to the worst of the worst via social media.

Not social media. Advertising, and any business that is funded by advertising. Social media before the maturing of internet advertising was great.

That is... not true.

Social media may have been an important tool for creating some of the circumstances we're in, but the causes go back much farther.

So thank the ~80,000 employees at Facebook working tirelessly to make the platform as shoddy as possible.

I'd say the root is circadian rhythm disruption. Artificial lighting, social media, etc.

Exactly. Without social media there would have been no nazis.

I don’t disagree that social media has played a massive role in changing the world in a negative way. This is a very far reaching claim though and one that kinda misses the forest for the trees. The problem is that fundamentally capitalism demands that companies find more ways to siphon more money from customers every quarter or they fail.

Social media is a perfect storm for the elites in this system. It’s a CIA wet dream. It’s literally a globalized and hyper personalized propaganda distribution platform. This is the inevitable outcome of capitalism and human behavior. Meta’s whole purpose is to create the most optimized pipeline for accepting money from 3rd parties in exchange for convincing as many people as possible of what they want those people to believe.

Social media is evil but it’s also the natural course of what happens with current technology and the incentives of capitalism.

All the problems? Really?

I'm pretty sure you're thinking of tuberculosis, not social media