They have no realistic option than use the social media sites in the link I included?
It is a completely coherent position to dislike and distrust a platform, and still use it daily because that's where your friends are.
Network effects are powerful. It's entirely possible for a platform to be popular even if _nobody_ is happy with it, due to a "tragedy of the commons"-like effect.
The only issue is the article makes it sound that your friends also dislike and distrust those same places. If that were true, it begs the question why are "all the teens" using it then? OR, alternatively, the survey and reporting conclusion is (somewhat) wrong or missing nuance.
Or are you referring to Facebook in this thread while strawmanning another user regarding it in another thread?
Do you realize your link points out that only 33% of teens use social media, down from 71% in 2015?
YouTube contains lots of human knowledge, because that's where many creators have decided to post their videos. I can't choose an alternative.
It's an attractor. The more people who are on a social media platform, the more value you can get from joining it yourself. Thus, you're more likely to join and then you joining makes the next person to come along also more likely to join.
This is almost everyone on FB...
Which then made me wonder: is there truly no good social messenger that's separate from social media now? Signal was the closest I could come up with, but it's missing lots of niceties especially in group messages.
The one thing that I don't see a good replacement for at the moment is event management because it inherently requires visibility to many people. As a musician I have been advertizing by events on FB (together with good ol' newsletters). Conversely, I have found out about many cool local events I would have missed otherwise. I'm using past tense because I have deactivated my FB since. (Meta sucking up to Trump broke the last straw for me.)
While an online marketplace doesn't require social media (see Craigslist), like events, you're missing out on a large population of potential sellers/buyers if you're not on Facebook.
You are severely downplaying the network effect.
Perhaps. What options do you see, and how do those options meet their requirements? How well do you understand their requirements?
IMHO "revealed preference" has to be interpreted very carefully, in the light of the fact the market actually rarely fully satisfies people's preferences, and nearly everything is a compromise, sometimes a large compromise. I very rarely see that done when "revealed preference" is brought up. In nearly all cases, it's not a gotcha to undermine what people say about their preferences, but that's how a lot of people try to use it.
So technically they have a choice, but c'mon, I feel like I'm talking to Ayn Rand here.