With all due respect, the narrative being spun here positions the social network as an entity as an impartial, disinterested actor that is simply facilitating conversations: this is not the case. All mainstream social media websites are (operated by) for-profit entities. They are selling access to human attention to advertisers to generate profit. Because of this, they are motivated to increase the amount of attention they have to sell; keep people in their app. And they have found via reliable experimentation by numerous social scientists that the most effective way is to keep users in a near-constant state of some combination of rage, indignation or disgust.

This poisons the entire well. I don't think the issue is that ~5% of the population is insane. I think the issue is social media has every reason in the world to find that 5% and give them the largest megaphone possible, up to and including TikTok's model of outright paying them for their insanity. The fact that the agent mediating all this intimacy as put by the author is inclined to do this, to shove the insane person in front of as many people as possible because they will readily cause reactions and further engagement with their product, makes it impossible to ignore them, nor to ignore the subsequent consequences of them being shoved in front of so many other people.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: social media cannot be a profit-driven industry. It simply cannot. The incentives for what makes a good, healthy, useful social media apparatus and the incentives that make it profitable to industry are two circles, with MAYBE 2% overlap in the middle on a good day.