Without discounting social media's harmful effects:
I do think Instagram in particular has been a boon for small businesses, providing them visibility in the marketplace that was previously unavailable to them.
Social media has also been a way for communities to connect organically with discoverability features missing on the old web.
There are positives and negatives - if it was only negatives people would be quicker to abandon the platforms.
Although I'm not familiar with the case at hand, I agree there's potential there for real harm, especially to children.
> I do think Instagram in particular has been a boon for small businesses, providing them visibility in the marketplace that was previously unavailable to them.
I am reminded of two Dominos Pizza announcements: in 2012 they launched an app to give "customers the ability to order from nearly every Domino's store in the U.S. from the palm of their hand"[0]; in 2014 they launched… voice ordering[1].
As if we had not already been ordering pizza on our "what's an app?" landlines using only our voices two decades earlier.
Regarding small business visibility, I'm old enough to remember when this visibility was provided by a thick tome delivered every so often to our doorstop, printed entirely on pages made of yellow paper. Hence the name "yellow pages": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_pages
In the UK, direct adverts were also supplied via our letterbox. This was also annoying, and still is, which is why many around here (I have moved to Berlin) have stickers on them reading (translated from German) "No adverts".
I do think Instagram in particular has been a boon for small businesses, providing them visibility in the marketplace that was previously unavailable to them.
Social media has also been a way for communities to connect organically with discoverability features missing on the old web.
There are positives and negatives - if it was only negatives people would be quicker to abandon the platforms.
Although I'm not familiar with the case at hand, I agree there's potential there for real harm, especially to children.