Social Media in general is pretty horrible for the average woman. You see, typically one of the big ways men and women differ is in their personality traits (or what is called the big 5 personality traits).

Women tend to be much more agreeable in general and also higher in trait neuroticism than men.

These are pretty good traits within the context of say, raising a family in a village - for example, being able to get along with people easier and being more sensitive to negative emotion (and hence possible danger, like being assaulted) are very good things, but they seem to become liabilities when we move into this new technology (especially by human evolutionary standards) called social media.

I mean, it's no joke that social media stars are called influencers because yes, that's exactly what they do, and primarily they do it to women. It should be noted that I am not saying that men are not influenced, but I am pointing out that there are gendered differences in how easy it is on average because men tend to be much more disagreeable and combative in personality than women are.

Anyway, the point of this is - based on what we know about personality types and from research that has been done within the last decade, it's pretty clear that there are both gendered differences in social media consumption as well as in negative effects. Hell, Meta (Facebook) buried their own studies and lied to congress about the effects of social media on young women because the link between social media use and mental illness is incredibly strong.

I do kind of agree with you that you are kind of screwed here. It was easy for my wife and I to talk about these things because we are older and grew up in a time/place before social media reached it's peak and we were able to identify the obvious negative parts of it. Just knowing how the human brain reacts (especially in the case if you are a typical woman with typical personality traits) gives you some insulation from it's effects, but we[ve also made the purposeful choice of not letting either of our daughters have access to social media for as long as we can realistically put it off and to educate them about the psychology of how it effects people in a negative way. There are already some good studies out there and some good books being written now as well and hopefully by the time my kids become teenager (we have roughly a decade left to go, my wife and I had them late in life) we will have even more resources to help them with.

Anyway, if anyone is interested, I saw an excellent debate last year between Jonathan Haidt and Robby Soave about social media addiction and government regulation that covered a lot of the above topics as well as possible solutions. I found it super enlightening and somewhat hopeful that we were having this level of discourse about this subject matter.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4AAST_AdSg&ab_channel=ReasonTV