Teens and social media: How to nurture good digital citizens

More and more adolescents are opening social media accounts; last year, 67% of U.S. adolescents between 13 — 17 years old had TikTok, and 95% used YouTube, and are doing so at a younger age.

Social media has a lot of potential benefits for youth including entertainment, socialization, education, information and community, as well as potential harms, such as exposure to harmful, age-inappropriate content or contact with adults and negative interactions with peers. A key concept here is potential. Even though youth today are very familiar with technology, they won’t magically extract all the benefits without scaffolding and support. We also can prevent these harms from happening.

One key factor that my colleagues and I highlighted in the recent American Psychological Association Health Advisory on social media use in adolescence is the need for fostering social media literacy and digital citizenship. We need to do a better job of preparing youth early on, before and as they open their social media accounts, and give them the skills and abilities they need to create, participate and use social media in a safe and meaningful way.

To this end,  Common Sense Education developed digital citizenship materials for the United States, and there are several schools in Seattle and around the state of Washington that are already implementing and adapting these and other materials locally, showing promise of a positive impact on students.

In my lab at the University of Washington, we extend this work to schools in Latin America, to do research and lead cultural and developmentally appropriate classes that promote digital citizenship. With our translation and adaptation of the Common Sense materials, we teach adolescents about a few key issues to promote digital maturity: media balance and well-being; privacy and security; digital footprint and online identities; relationships online; digital drama and cyberbullying; and news and media literacy. We have incorporated  Social Media Test Drive, a hands-on, educational app that trains young adolescents on a simulated social media platform.

Older adolescents report more frequent positive and negative experiences on social media than younger adolescents. This is a clear indicator of the need to intervene early. Young adolescents are going through puberty and experiencing a lot of changes to their social lives and interests. They are very keen on getting their own phones and social media accounts.

At the same time, young adolescents are still more open to parental and teacher guidance (compared to older adolescents). Thus, it is the prime time to learn about digital citizenship and social media literacy to maximize positive online experiences.

We encourage parents and teachers to have conversations about how design features of digital platforms are transforming our relationships with others. Social media allow us to strengthen offline relationships, and also build online friendships and find supportive communities (as we so clearly experienced during the pandemic).

At the same time, we also need to highlight:

∙ Likes allow us to put a number on our popularity, leading us to compare ourselves to other people, which can be bad for our mood and self-esteem;

∙ Chasing likes can lead us to take negative risks (such as drinking or doing dangerous activities). What’s more, social media might lead us to think that everyone is doing these things when in reality they are not as frequent;

∙ Curation, editing and filters paint a very idealistic, unreal picture of what others are experiencing online and offline. This can lead to body image concerns and the fear of missing out;

∙ Social media platforms want to keep us engaged — it is part of their business model to get our attention and our data and rely on algorithms that recommend content we really like so that we will keep clicking. This can make it hard to control our use.

∙ Scaffolding and supporting positive social media use is a task for everyone: We want to encourage schools to incorporate digital citizenship programs. We want families to have these conversations early on. We also want platforms to use age-appropriate design and develop better ways to onboard young people.

From the research perspective, we will continue to study the online lives of youth in all its nuance — the positives and the negatives — and use this information to support youth in maximizing the opportunities and minimizing the risks online.