Those products are both owned by an ad company, they're incentivized to push all your buttons so they can maximize the time you spend looking at ads. Similar offerings exist which don't, and as a result have a very different vibe.

Social media is just a paradigm for multimedia communication and networking over the internet. It isn't inherently good or bad, any more than telephones, television, radio or the internet itself.

I think many people find social media useful. If you aren't one of those people, fair enough. But not everyone is angry and addicted all the time.

It is quite debatable whether it is inherently good or bad.

There is not a whole lot of scientific evidence for it being good from what I understand.

I would also argue that if you broaden the definition of social media too far you’re not really talking about social media anymore. Calling your friends on Signal isn’t “social media.”

"good" and "bad" aren't objective or quantifiable, so there can't be scientific evidence that social media is either.

And the definition of social media is broad. I would argue Signal is social media. It lets you form social networks, chat and share different kinds of media. That's all social media is. Social media is more than Twitter, Facebook and TikTok. And I have trouble with the argument that being able to form social networks and share different kind of media is somehow ontologically evil. There are hundreds of social media platforms around the world and countless apps integrating social features, but only a few American platforms seem to be a problem. So maybe it isn't "social media," maybe it's American culture and Silicon Valley capitalism.

The addiction loops, surveillance, data mining, radicalization through algorithms promoting extremist content, etc. aren't fundamental to what social media is, they're aspects of how specific social media platforms have been implemented. It is possible to have social media without all of those negative externalities.

For a significant subset of users - younger people and children - a consensus is forming among specialists that social media is indeed inherently bad.

They said the same thing about video games, and the internet as a whole, and cellphones, and television, and magazines.

I'm not going to claim that social media can't have negative consequences for young people, lots of things do. But the hyperbole behind the discourse makes it obvious there is also a moral panic at work. In every case, technology is blamed for a failure of society's responsibility to educate and raise children properly.

IIRC peer reviewed scientific study was not saying that about video games, it was other less thoroughly researched sources and/or propaganda groups.