It's absolutely fair that this type of data is better off coming from a third party, peer reviewed, and with a larger sample size. However, the slides here were never intended as any sort of definitive review, or especially not for PR consumption, they're kind of like an internal memo looked over by a few internal teams. So their data is not cherry picked - it shows the good and the bad uncovered about Instagram's effects, intended for internal discussion. Where I feel WSJ was dishonest is that it did not show all of the data uncovered in these slides, but only the most negative points, in order to get clicks and provide a nice loud framing for their article.

Any large scale phenomenon like Instagram or Reddit or pizza or video games has both upsides and downsides. So I don't think it's fair that just because we've uncovered links to heart disease for pizza or depression/anxiety/social withdrawal/suicide to excessive video gaming or suicide to Instagram, that we should ban any of these things. They all have extremely positive effects as well. I love pizza. If we only harp on negative aspects of every large scale phenomenon we're going to think everything is terrible, ban everything, then live in a box.

That is the sensationalist vibe which WSJ intentionally curated for their article by intentionally hiding any positive information found in Facebook's memos and selectively exposing only the bits which make people go "WOW NO" and make for nice clickbait. If they had included both positive and negative results contained in Facebook's slides, then I don't believe there would be a problem. I personally did not expect this kind of spin from WSJ and am disappointed.