This doesn’t read like science, but more importantly it is deeply flawed logic:

A person is in a car that is heading off a cliff. While they are naive of this fact, they are content but destined to an untimely demise. They are made aware of the fact and become deeply anxious.

What is causative in this scenario? Ignoring the cliff, we could say that the awareness is at fault for the person’s anxiety. But if the person were better informed about their state and there was no cliff, there would be no anxiety.

A root cause analysis would show that fundamental problem is not that the driver knows where they are going, but the fact that they are headed off a cliff in the first place.

To determine that social media is the root cause of increased teenage mental illness rates, we would need to confirm that social media in a utopian environment still causes mental illness. This is a claim without much evidence, particularly because the more one becomes informed about the world the more the will be exposed to its legitimate problems. What would be more practical, then, is to determine what incidence of mental illness occurs with awareness these issues where social media is not a factor, and then to evaluate what if any factor remains to explained by social media. The editorial does not take this approach, but instead appears to attempt a firehose of rationalizations that don’t converge to make a coherent thesis.

Perhaps the editorial author’s book isn’t selling well.