I see it in analogy to sugar free sweeteners. There's some evidence that the physical experience of tasting sweetness is an essential phase in triggering the body's mechanisms to deal with large sugar intake. And that triggering that mechanism without providing any material for your body to consume can actually do damage to you as it searches for something to metabolize (this is just an analogy, feel free to prove me wrong).

But just like that, online social interactions trigger some part of our internal mechanisms for reacting to actual community and belonging and healthy debate/conversation, but without the complete "meal" to digest that those things actually provide. Thereby triggering maladaptive behaviors and actually doing damage to the systems that regulate in person socializing.

Probably over complicated but who among us, right?

I think this relates alot to what other posters are saying about how it's difficult to break into established social circles without somebody introducing you in. After all, you're more likely to make friends with a room of individuals than a room of cliques.

What social media does is it greatly strengthens preexisting social circles that there is less incentive for someone to be open-minded and make new friends. Take video games for example, I can personally attest people were alot more sociable and open to friend requests a decade ago than today.

One perception on what is causing this would be Discord. In the past, most people playing would be individuals, and group activities would naturally force people to socialize with strangers. The friends you made in one game would not follow you to another. With Discord, nowadays it's more of alot of premade groups of friends playing these games, so there's no reason to socialize in public chat or care about strangers.

Now Discord isn't new, Skype or BBS existed years before, but they were harder to set up, so pre-made groups were less prevalent and the barriers of entry would naturally mean people with more of an open mindset would be using them. Discord in contrast is very easy to get started with, so the more "conservative" elements would take precedence.

Maybe social media catalyzes the problem but the point is that it’s not the root cause, in the same way that opioids did not in of themselves cause the opioid epidemic.

You need to provide some empirical evidence demonstrating what is the true root cause of the increase in mental health problems then.

Probably the first step is to simply prove that mental health issues are also increasing among populations that don’t use social media.

Haidt reviewed those kind of studies in depth before making his conclusions.

Iron poisoning and lead deficiency. They got it the wrong way round. They incorrectly packed every major cognitive process into the neocortex, instead of assigning them each to the correct part. They got the idea of intelligence the wrong way round: The function of the neocortex is dimensionality reduction - the more powerful it is, the simpler everything is. You can't improve anything that easily. You actually broke it.

> The evidence that it has a lot to do with social media is very strong.

Once you ignore finance and lack of housing (and/or overpopulation), then yes.

Japan, the subject of tfa, has low housing costs and falling populations in most prefectures, and a stabilizing population in tokyo.

> tfa

"the fucking article"?

Also: "the featured article", "the fine article", it's a TLA that has largely transcended swearing to become semi common shorthand.

No, Haidt’s analysis includes those factors.