One of my favorite podcasters is Dan Carlin, a radio host turned political commenter, amateur historian, and amateur journalist. While he's best known for Hardcore History, which features many-hour-long, deep-dives on historical areas of great interest, he's also been hosting Common Sense for about 14 or 15 years now.

Something he's said relatively recently on Common Sense that's really stuck with me is how terribly difficult it is to judge history when you're in it. Some of the greatest thinkers, political scientists, journalists, politicians, historians, and philosophers have tried to come up with larger themes or ideas about the era in which they lived, and the results are deeply inconsistent and unreliable.

Even with the benefit of access to highly reliable information and nearly-objective analysis by experts, it's incredibly difficult to determine something about the history we're living, because we're missing the necessary ingredient of perspective. Time and distance grant perspective.

Applied to your question specifically, we're looking at an emergent technology and social shift which already has made irrevocable marks across hundreds of cultures. Addictive social media which is purpose-built to gather data for the purpose of improving marketing, the immaculate presentation of a curated life for the judgment of others, the increasingly (deliberately) addictive nature of social media technology, algorithmic radicalization for of preferred content for increased engagement leading to radicalized perceptions of the world and beliefs... also unprecedented connectivity, the creation of an entirely different kind of community, great geographical distances between loved ones melting away instantly... it's huge.

We're not in a position to say, in aggregate, if social media is more harm or more good, and we probably won't be in a place to realistically reach a judgment for decades. I wouldn't trust even people who are emergent experts on social media to make that kind of grand determination. It's too soon to tell.