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Guys, tween girls are 'invading' Sephora and scaring everyone with 'ruthless' behaviour

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They wont rest until they get their anti-wrinkle cream

Sephora has long been the golden gates of beauty products. The stores - humungous, and recently introduced to the UK - offer every product to reduce pores, cover blemishes, turn back time on aging and, for some reason, this mothership of makeup is now appealing to tweens. More specifically, ten-year-olds.

"Has anyone else noticed that every time you go into Sephora now it's just all little girls?" TikTok user Chloe asked her 12,000 followers just before Christmas, in a video which has now been vieweed more than three million times. "I don't know if this is everywhere lately, but I swear every time I go into these expensive makeup stores it's just all really young little girls, which is really upsetting to see."

Seemingly, the tweens (like us watching Zoella's makeup tutorials in the '00s) are after the products, which have gone viral online - particularly on TikTok - and subsequently sold out: Drunk Elephant, Glow Recipe, Rare Beauty, and Sol De Janeiro. The scarcity of the products has made them a cult purchase. Like the latest toy everybody wants.

After Chloe's post, many other users started posting their experiences of the tween phenomenon in Sephora: "I was in Sephora just before New Year's and was buying some bits for myself," recalled a user called Elina Boudin. "This group of girls walk in, they can't be older than 10, and they walk up to this poor woman who's working there - trying to do her job - and they say 'where are the [Drunk Elephant] bronzing drops?'. No 'please'. No 'thank you'. Just 'WHERE ARE THEY?'"

"The woman takes them over despite being with another customer," Elina continues. "She opens the drawers, shows them that they're out of stock and they just say to her 'check the back'...They just kept badgering her...I just want to know: Where are these kids parents? Allowing them to have such bad attitudes and behave this way towards other people" she asks. "These kids are disrespectful, rude, and literally damaging their skin with the products."

After more accounts of customers overhearing tweens in Sephora went viral on TikTok, a woman, Sav, who works in Sephora in the US made a video of her own, with a theory of what is actually going on: "I want to talk about ten-year-olds at Sephora because yes, they are there," she said.

"You think it's bad for you as a customer? Imagine how bad it is for an employee. Last time I was in for a shift, I cleaned up three skincare smoothies [piles of squeezed out products] from Drunk Elephant. It's always when the groups of kids come into the store that we then find all of the empty Summer Fridays boxes."

"Worst is when they just go into the drawers," she continued. "I walk up and I'm like 'Hey, you're not supposed to be in there. Are you looking for something?' And they don't move. Or react."

Guessing why this might be happening, Sav said: "I'm going to be brave and draw a parallel: the kids not being able to read, and the kids wanting Drunk Elephant- Millennial parenting. We are now seeing after effects of what it does to a child when you give them an iPad to shut them up instead of yelling at them to shut up. Cause at the end of the day, let's be real, it's not the kid's fault they're annoying."

The tween appetite for Drunk Elephant products has gotten so huge the brand has been criticised for "marketing to 12-year-olds" and has even posted an Instagram outlining which products are actually suitable for children: "I would say stay away from our more potent products that include acids and retinols," it read. "Their skin does not need these ingredients quite yet."

To which, the response from actual adults was one of rage: "I used to buy Drunk Elephant but will never purchase again," wrote one user. "Encouraging children to use your products! Children should be protected from social media and the pressures to look perfect and all the things you need to do to look 'perfect' and Drunk Elephant is using this insecurity being drilled into children/tweens to sell products. Children's skin is perfect the way it is!! And children definitely don't need to be worrying about anti-aging."

The Tab has contacted Sephora for comment.

Related stories recommended by this writer:

* Erm, there's a pretty dark side to Tik Tok's new When We Were Young trend

* Shock, rich people are using Saltburn to show off their humungous houses on TikTok

* The grad who went viral for crying about working a nine to five has just lost her job
Featured image credit via TikTok

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Guys, tween girls are 'invading' Sephora and scaring everyone with 'ruthless' behaviour

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Everyone on TikTok is sharing stories of groups of 10-year-old girls who've been rude to them in Sephora to get their hands on beauty products.

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Do Yourself a Favor and Go Find a 'Third Place'

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We need physical spaces for serendipitous, productivity-free conversation.

This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.
On a Sunday last year, I was walking through a suburban neighborhood in Pennsylvania, heading home from an early-afternoon meditation class. One of the nondescript stucco houses had a curious sticker on its mailbox reading Mac's Club. I checked Google Maps to see if I was standing next to a cleverly disguised business-what might pretentiously be referred to in a city as a speakeasy-but nothing popped up, so I peeked inside the house. That's where I spotted a pool table and a middle-aged guy sitting at the end of a long, mahogany bar, drinking a Bloody Mary by himself. Apparently I'd stumbled upon a social club meant for residents of the neighborhood. Though at first the bartender was incredulous that I'd just walked in, he soon rewarded my sense of adventure with a Guinness on the house. The Eagles weren't playing in the NFL that day, and he was grateful for the additional company. We talked about the upcoming deer season, and upon learning that I was a new hunter, the two guys showed me a rifle that was kept in another room.

On the train back to Philadelphia, where I was living at the time, I felt much more euphoric about the unexpected hangout than I did about the supposedly spiritual experience that had preceded it. To me, the ideal hangout has a few components: spontaneity, purposelessness, and a willingness among all parties involved to go wherever the conversation leads them. This one met all the criteria. Two strangers took a chance on spending an hour with an outsider-a tiny woman of ambiguous age who is sometimes told she resembles the Disney character Spinelli -who was enticed by a simple sign. They had no reason to expect we would share common ground. But we managed to have a perfect, no-stakes interaction after two years in which many people haven't taken a chance on anybody.

Besides giving me the feeling that I'd flexed a muscle that had atrophied, the interaction was special to me because I'd found a classic "third place" in the suburbs, where I least expected it. The term, which was coined by the sociologist Ray Oldenburg in the 1980s, essentially refers to a physical location other than work or home where there's little to no financial barrier to entry and where conversation is the primary activity. The historical examples that Oldenburg cites in his book The Great Good Place include French cafés, German American beer gardens, and English pubs, all of which appeal to people from various walks of life.

In my early 20s, I was unacquainted with the term third place, though the hope of someday becoming a regular at one was the primary reason I moved from the Florida suburbs to New York City. After all, cities are where people are supposed to have serendipitous encounters-as the writer and critic Jane Jacobs said, "The metropolis provides what otherwise could be given only by traveling; namely, the strange." By comparison, the cliché goes, people become more atomized the farther they move from urban environments into the clinical, safe, and relatively unexciting suburbs. I spent most of my teenage years listening to whiny guitar-based music that drove home that exact point.
Read: Revenge of the suburbs
But these days, the art of hanging out seems to be waning in cities. The American Community Life Survey reported last year that only 25 percent of people living in areas with "very high" amenity access-close to grocery stores, gyms, bowling alleys, and other ideal sites of chance encounters-actually socialize with strangers at least once a week. In 2019, about two-thirds of Americans said they had a favorite local place they went to regularly. That two-thirds has since dropped to a little more than half, according to the survey. Clearly, COVID-19's arrival accelerated the problem-making small talk with strangers scaled back, because of infection risk, while some bars and restaurants became to-go establishments, discouraging loitering. When I caught up with Oldenburg, the third-place sociologist, over the phone in the summer of 2020, he told me that he was socializing in his Florida garage, which he'd converted into a pseudo dive bar for him and his friend to use-no more venturing out in search of serendipity. If the world's foremost scholar on the importance of mingling with strangers had all but given up on doing so himself, what hope was there for the rest of us? (Now might be as good a moment as ever for many vaccinated Americans to fraternize, but those who are older or immunocompromised still have real concerns about the coronavirus.)

Rich Heyman, an American-studies professor at the University of Texas at Austin, sees what's happened during the COVID era as the continuation of a trend that began in the middle of the 20th century. When city dwellers were largely confined to crowded tenements, they were forced out into the world, which often meant hanging out with strangers in taverns. But as time went on, leisure became privatized. Living conditions improved; people chose to sit with their nuclear families in front of the television. This is similar to the diagnosis of modern American life that Robert Putnam put forth in his seminal work, Bowling Alone, though Heyman notes that the problem has been exacerbated since the book came out in 2000. Today people frequently spend their leisure time in solitude with their personal screens. "Now we have on-demand streaming, and social media, which are further extensions of that fundamental shift," he told me.

Thus, the simple act of spending time with new people can be an unnecessarily complex challenge. David Rapp, a 40-year-old former schoolteacher from the outskirts of Chicago, told me a story familiar to any single person's whose friend group has settled down and procreated: He found scheduling hangouts with his buddies difficult. And like me, he assumed that moving to a major city would help him meet new friends on a regular basis.

Although he quickly joined a local runners' group upon arriving in Chicago proper, these meetups obviously came with an expectation of productivity. (The fact that the group was more about exercising than conversation disqualifies it from being a third place, per Oldenburg's theory.) And as an ex-drinker, Rapp had no interest in the bar scene. Coffee shops filled the void during the day but tended to close in the late afternoon. Frederick Law Olmsted-the architect of Central Park-incidentally designed parks as ideal third places, but good luck approaching a stranger in one at night without looking like a creep. Ironically, Rapp started driving half an hour outside the city to a suburban tea shop that stayed open late and could afford to let him loiter.

So what's replaced hangouts in the city? In many cases, I'd consider them ersatz third places: establishments that are either too expensive for the average American or apparently designed to disincentivize lingering. Think carefully curated faux dive bars that serve $15 beer-and-shot specials, or parks like New York's High Line that are built to be moved through in a linear fashion. Meanwhile, the ground between the third place and the office-what Oldenburg called the "second place"-is murky. Co-working spaces and corporate amenities such as employee-only coffee shops tap the aesthetics and function of a café-plush seating, the availability of caffeine-to insidiously extract more productivity from workers. In these privatized third places, there is an expectation that all conversation will be centered on work. There is the underlying anxiety of being on the clock-the antithesis of just hanging out. And the possibility of a wildly unexpected encounter is slim given that most people in attendance will be in roughly the same socioeconomic stratum because they work in similar jobs.

The ersatz third place is a consequence of a culture obsessed with productivity and status, whose subjects might have decent incomes but little recreational time. Urban-dwelling Americans, however, tend to place work at the center of life in part because cities are so expensive to live in. They might work 50-hour weeks to survive, leaving little to no time for leisure and community engagement. Unstructured quality time with friends is replaced with a scheduled series of continuous catch-ups. Subsequently, these overscheduled people lack meaningful ties with their neighbors, and so they patronize spaces to make those connections even less frequently.
How to Build a Life: A profession is not a personality
Kathy Giuffre, a professor at Colorado College who studies third places, told me that a real third place can also contain an element of casual social aid. "You can get a shoulder to cry on via your best friend, but sometimes you need someone to lend you a cup of sugar, and that's about proximity," she told me. "You just need someone to watch your dog for five minutes while you run into a store or something." Ultimately, she said, a world made up of atomized, physically isolated people is a world without a true shared reality-which is a recipe for civic disengagement, misinformation, and perhaps even political extremism.

Maybe to drive home her point about the lack of third places in the United States, Giuffre said that she's in the process of moving to a Tuscan village and plans to spend her retirement sitting in a café with old men, playing dominos. But for people who don't have the resources to move to Europe in search of a pure third place-such as myself-she offered a bit of advice: "Socializing is a learned skill, but the last time we learned it we were probably little kids. So be kind to yourself, because you might be out of practice."

With that in mind, a friend and I recently went to an old favorite called the Tip Top Bar & Grill, in the Bed-Stuy neighborhood of Brooklyn. It checks all the boxes of a classic third place: It has been around for decades; it is family owned; and it serves nothing much fancier than Miller High Life. We were there for a Texas-hoedown-themed barbecue, replete with great music and free homemade food. I spent five hours stuffing myself with ribs and making a couple of new pals who invited me back yet again for a birthday celebration. This was all on a Sunday night, and none of the patrons seemed too worried about getting to work the next day. On this glorious evening, the rules seemed not to apply. If only this happened more often.

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Do Yourself a Favor and Go Find a 'Third Place'

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We need physical spaces for serendipitous, productivity-free conversation.

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First-Gen Social Media Users Have Nowhere to Go

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A golden age of connectivity is ending. "I deleted my Facebook years ago, spend at least three to six months off Twitter every year, and Bluesky invites are just sitting in my inbox," a friend tells me when I ask how her relationship to social media has changed in recent times. "I basically only use [Instagram] Stories and almost never post on the grid. I do it once a week so I can get away with saying 'Free Palestine' without the algorithm punishing me. I refuse to get any more accounts. I'm over it."

This is how it goes now, in what is being christened the twilight of an era of social media that redefined community building and digital correspondence. For many first-gen social media users-millennials between the ages of 27 and 42-there is a developing sentiment that the party is over.

Twitter is bad (sorry, I will never refer to it as X). Instagram is overrun with ads and influencers hawking face creams and fitness tips. TikTok, what originally felt like a glossier alternative to YouTube, increasingly resembles an outlet mall full of "dupes," prizing hype over lasting influence.

Influence is one attribute Twitter never lacked, as evidenced by the mad dash in Silicon Valley to fill the gulf its collapse is leaving. I've spent an unhealthy amount of time on the platform over the last decade. It was the avenue of the Black Lives Matter movement, a megaphone for everyday users, and, through a wave of history-setting and history-unsettling US elections, transformed culture into a 24/7 participatory event. There is no #MeToo without Twitter, nor the beginnings of a racial reckoning in Hollywood. Twitter refashioned the look of communication through a vernacular of memes and GIFs, where resident collectives like Black Twitter and NBA Twitter excelled as virtuosos of the form.

It has now been a year since Elon Musk assumed control of Twitter, and in what felt like record time, he has taken a sledgehammer to everything that gave the platform its unique draw (issues of safety and inclusion were a problem under former CEO Jack Dorsey but have significantly worsened). There is a void in the social media universe that, until now, Twitter singularly occupied.

In its heyday, from 2008 to 2015, before digital currencies like retweets and views reoriented how users interacted with one another, no other platform offered what Twitter did, the way it did: up-to-the-second real-time conversation and analysis. It was a blank slate, and because it was a blank slate, it was a canvas to document what was happening to us and around us. It was revolutionary, and soon what we remember of it will be gone.

If the early promise of social media was to bring society closer to a virtual ideal, the most recent shift in how platforms are used has lost the plot.

If the early promise of social media was to bring society closer to a virtual ideal, the most recent shift in how platforms are used has lost the plot. Along with Twitter, the erosion of the user experience on Facebook and Instagram-with tiered subscriptions, a proliferation of hate speech and misinformation, privacy being sold as a luxury, and the threat of generative AI-marks a sharp turning point in the value of the social web. It's "too much echo chamber," my friend says of what the social internet has evolved into. "It's too much viewing people you know in real life as marketing categories." Everything about the current online user experience, she says, is "too mind-melting."

Social media today is less driven by actual social connection. It is powered by the "appearance of social connection," says Marlon Twyman II, a quantitative social scientist at USC Annenberg who specializes in social network analysis. "Human relationships have suffered and their complexity has diminished. Because many of our interactions are now occurring in platforms designed to promote transactional interactions that provide feedback in the form of attention metrics, many people do not have much experience or practice interacting with people in settings where there are collective or communal goals for a larger group." This has also led to people being more image-conscious and identity-focused in real-world interactions, too, Twyman adds.

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Lauren Goode, Michael Calore, and Boone Ashworth

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First-Gen Social Media Users Have Nowhere to Go

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The collective erosion of X, Instagram, and Facebook marks a turning point for millennials, who are outgrowing a constant need to be plugged in.

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The environment in which kids grow up today is hostile to human development.

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Something went suddenly and horribly wrong for adolescents in the early 2010s. By now you've likely seen the statistics: Rates of depression and anxiety in the United States-fairly stable in the 2000s-rose by more than 50 percent in many studies from 2010 to 2019. The suicide rate rose 48 percent for adolescents ages 10 to 19. For girls ages 10 to 14, it rose 131 percent.
Read: It sure looks like phones are making students dumber
As the oldest members of Gen Z reach their late 20s, their troubles are carrying over into adulthood. Young adults are dating less, having less sex, and showing less interest in ever having children than prior generations. They are more likely to live with their parents. They were less likely to get jobs as teens, and managers say they are harder to work with. Many of these trends began with earlier generations, but most of them accelerated with Gen Z.

Surveys show that members of Gen Z are shyer and more risk averse than previous generations, too, and risk aversion may make them less ambitious. In an interview last May, OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman and Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison noted that, for the first time since the 1970s, none of Silicon Valley's preeminent entrepreneurs are under 30. "Something has really gone wrong," Altman said. In a famously young industry, he was baffled by the sudden absence of great founders in their 20s.

Generations are not monolithic, of course. Many young people are flourishing. Taken as a whole, however, Gen Z is in poor mental health and is lagging behind previous generations on many important metrics. And if a generation is doing poorly--if it is more anxious and depressed and is starting families, careers, and important companies at a substantially lower rate than previous generations--then the sociological and economic consequences will be profound for the entire society.

Number of emergency-department visits for nonfatal self-harm per 100,000 children (source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention)

What happened in the early 2010s that altered adolescent development and worsened mental health? Theories abound, but the fact that similar trends are found in many countries worldwide means that events and trends that are specific to the United States cannot be the main story.

I think the answer can be stated simply, although the underlying psychology is complex: Those were the years when adolescents in rich countries traded in their flip phones for smartphones and moved much more of their social lives online-particularly onto social-media platforms designed for virality and addiction. Once young people began carrying the entire internet in their pockets, available to them day and night, it altered their daily experiences and developmental pathways across the board. Friendship, dating, sexuality, exercise, sleep, academics, politics, family dynamics, identity-all were affected. Life changed rapidly for younger children, too, as they began to get access to their parents' smartphones and, later, got their own iPads, laptops, and even smartphones during elementary school.
Jonathan Haidt: Get phones out of schools now
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But before we can evaluate the evidence on any one potential avenue of harm, we need to step back and ask a broader question: What is childhood--including adolescence--and how did it change when smartphones moved to the center of it? If we take a more holistic view of what childhood is and what young children, tweens, and teens need to do to mature into competent adults, the picture becomes much clearer. Smartphone-based life, it turns out, alters or interferes with a great number of developmental processes.

The intrusion of smartphones and social media are not the only changes that have deformed childhood. There's an important backstory, beginning as long ago as the 1980s, when we started systematically depriving children and adolescents of freedom, unsupervised play, responsibility, and opportunities for risk taking, all of which promote competence, maturity, and mental health. But the change in childhood accelerated in the early 2010s, when an already independence-deprived generation was lured into a new virtual universe that seemed safe to parents but in fact is more dangerous, in many respects, than the physical world.

My claim is that the new phone-based childhood that took shape roughly 12 years ago is making young people sick and blocking their progress to flourishing in adulthood. We need a dramatic cultural correction, and we need it now.

1. The Decline of Play and Independence

Human brains are extraordinarily large compared with those of other primates, and human childhoods are extraordinarily long, too, to give those large brains time to wire up within a particular culture. A child's brain is already 90 percent of its adult size by about age 6. The next 10 or 15 years are about learning norms and mastering skills-physical, analytical, creative, and social. As children and adolescents seek out experiences and practice a wide variety of behaviors, the synapses and neurons that are used frequently are retained while those that are used less often disappear. Neurons that fire together wire together, as brain researchers say.

Brain development is sometimes said to be "experience-expectant," because specific parts of the brain show increased plasticity during periods of life when an animal's brain can "expect" to have certain kinds of experiences. You can see this with baby geese, who will imprint on whatever mother-sized object moves in their vicinity just after they hatch. You can see it with human children, who are able to learn languages quickly and take on the local accent, but only through early puberty; after that, it's hard to learn a language and sound like a native speaker. There is also some evidence of a sensitive period for cultural learning more generally. Japanese children who spent a few years in California in the 1970s came to feel "American" in their identity and ways of interacting only if they attended American schools for a few years between ages 9 and 15. If they left before age 9, there was no lasting impact. If they didn't arrive until they were 15, it was too late; they didn't come to feel American.

Human childhood is an extended cultural apprenticeship with different tasks at different ages all the way through puberty. Once we see it this way, we can identify factors that promote or impede the right kinds of learning at each age. For children of all ages, one of the most powerful drivers of learning is the strong motivation to play. Play is the work of childhood, and all young mammals have the same job: to wire up their brains by playing vigorously and often, practicing the moves and skills they'll need as adults. Kittens will play-pounce on anything that looks like a mouse tail. Human children will play games such as tag and sharks and minnows, which let them practice both their predator skills and their escaping-from-predator skills. Adolescents will play sports with greater intensity, and will incorporate playfulness into their social interactions-flirting, teasing, and developing inside jokes that bond friends together. Hundreds of studies on young rats, monkeys, and humans show that young mammals want to play, need to play, and end up socially, cognitively, and emotionally impaired when they are deprived of play.

One crucial aspect of play is physical risk taking. Children and adolescents must take risks and fail-often-in environments in which failure is not very costly. This is how they extend their abilities, overcome their fears, learn to estimate risk, and learn to cooperate in order to take on larger challenges later. The ever-present possibility of getting hurt while running around, exploring, play-fighting, or getting into a real conflict with another group adds an element of thrill, and thrilling play appears to be the most effective kind for overcoming childhood anxieties and building social, emotional, and physical competence. The desire for risk and thrill increases in the teen years, when failure might carry more serious consequences. Children of all ages need to choose the risk they are ready for at a given moment. Young people who are deprived of opportunities for risk taking and independent exploration will, on average, develop into more anxious and risk-averse adults.
From the April 2014 issue: The overprotected kid
Human childhood and adolescence evolved outdoors, in a physical world full of dangers and opportunities. Its central activities--play, exploration, and intense socializing--were largely unsupervised by adults, allowing children to make their own choices, resolve their own conflicts, and take care of one another. Shared adventures and shared adversity bound young people together into strong friendship clusters within which they mastered the social dynamics of small groups, which prepared them to master bigger challenges and larger groups later on.

And then we changed childhood.

In recent decades, seeing unchaperoned children outdoors has become so novel that when one is spotted in the wild, some adults feel it is their duty to call the police. In 2015, the Pew Research Center found that parents, on average, believed that children should be at least 10 years old to play unsupervised in front of their house, and that kids should be 14 before being allowed to go unsupervised to a public park. Most of these same parents had enjoyed joyous and unsupervised outdoor play by the age of 7 or 8.

But overprotection is only part of the story. The transition away from a more independent childhood was facilitated by steady improvements in digital technology, which made it easier and more inviting for young people to spend a lot more time at home, indoors, and alone in their rooms. Eventually, tech companies got access to children 24/7. They developed exciting virtual activities, engineered for "engagement," that are nothing like the real-world experiences young brains evolved to expect.

2. The Virtual World Arrives in Two Waves

The internet, which now dominates the lives of young people, arrived in two waves of linked technologies. The first one did little harm to Millennials. The second one swallowed Gen Z whole.

The first wave came ashore in the 1990s with the arrival of dial-up internet access, which made personal computers good for something beyond word processing and basic games. By 2003, 55 percent of American households had a computer with (slow) internet access. Rates of adolescent depression, loneliness, and other measures of poor mental health did not rise in this first wave. If anything, they went down a bit. Millennial teens (born 1981 through 1995), who were the first to go through puberty with access to the internet, were psychologically healthier and happier, on average, than their older siblings or parents in Generation X (born 1965 through 1980).

The second wave began to rise in the 2000s, though its full force didn't hit until the early 2010s. It began rather innocently with the introduction of social-media platforms that helped people connect with their friends. Posting and sharing content became much easier with sites such as Friendster (launched in 2003), Myspace (2003), and Facebook (2004).

Teens embraced social media soon after it came out, but the time they could spend on these sites was limited in those early years because the sites could only be accessed from a computer, often the family computer in the living room. Young people couldn't access social media (and the rest of the internet) from the school bus, during class time, or while hanging out with friends outdoors. Many teens in the early-to-mid-2000s had cellphones, but these were basic phones (many of them flip phones) that had no internet access. Typing on them was difficult--they had only number keys. Basic phones were tools that helped Millennials meet up with one another in person or talk with each other one-on-one. I have seen no evidence to suggest that basic cellphones harmed the mental health of Millennials.

3. Techno-optimism and the Birth of the Phone-Based Childhood

The phone-based childhood created by that second wave-including not just smartphones themselves, but all manner of internet-connected devices, such as tablets, laptops, video-game consoles, and smartwatches-arrived near the end of a period of enormous optimism about digital technology. The internet came into our lives in the mid-1990s, soon after the fall of the Soviet Union. By the end of that decade, it was widely thought that the web would be an ally of democracy and a slayer of tyrants. When people are connected to each other, and to all the information in the world, how could any dictator keep them down?

In the 2000s, Silicon Valley and its world-changing inventions were a source of pride and excitement in America. Smart and ambitious young people around the world wanted to move to the West Coast to be part of the digital revolution. Tech-company founders such as Steve Jobs and Sergey Brin were lauded as gods, or at least as modern Prometheans, bringing humans godlike powers. The Arab Spring bloomed in 2011 with the help of decentralized social platforms, including Twitter and Facebook. When pundits and entrepreneurs talked about the power of social media to transform society, it didn't sound like a dark prophecy.

You have to put yourself back in this heady time to understand why adults acquiesced so readily to the rapid transformation of childhood. Many parents had concerns, even then, about what their children were doing online, especially because of the internet's ability to put children in contact with strangers. But there was also a lot of excitement about the upsides of this new digital world. If computers and the internet were the vanguards of progress, and if young people--widely referred to as "digital natives"--were going to live their lives entwined with these technologies, then why not give them a head start? I remember how exciting it was to see my 2-year-old son master the touch-and-swipe interface of my first iPhone in 2008. I thought I could see his neurons being woven together faster as a result of the stimulation it brought to his brain, compared to the passivity of watching television or the slowness of building a block tower. I thought I could see his future job prospects improving.

Touchscreen devices were also a godsend for harried parents. Many of us discovered that we could have peace at a restaurant, on a long car trip, or at home while making dinner or replying to emails if we just gave our children what they most wanted: our smartphones and tablets. We saw that everyone else was doing it and figured it must be okay.

It was the same for older children, desperate to join their friends on social-media platforms, where the minimum age to open an account was set by law to 13, even though no research had been done to establish the safety of these products for minors. Because the platforms did nothing (and still do nothing) to verify the stated age of new-account applicants, any 10-year-old could open multiple accounts without parental permission or knowledge, and many did. Facebook and later Instagram became places where many sixth and seventh graders were hanging out and socializing. If parents did find out about these accounts, it was too late. Nobody wanted their child to be isolated and alone, so parents rarely forced their children to shut down their accounts.

We had no idea what we were doing.

4. The High Cost of a Phone-Based Childhood

In Walden, his 1854 reflection on simple living, Henry David Thoreau wrote, "The cost of a thing is the amount of ... life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run." It's an elegant formulation of what economists would later call the opportunity cost of any choice-all of the things you can no longer do with your money and time once you've committed them to something else. So it's important that we grasp just how much of a young person's day is now taken up by their devices.

The numbers are hard to believe. The most recent Gallup data show that American teens spend about five hours a day just on social-media platforms (including watching videos on TikTok and YouTube). Add in all the other phone- and screen-based activities, and the number rises to somewhere between seven and nine hours a day, on average. The numbers are even higher in single-parent and low-income families, and among Black, Hispanic, and Native American families.

These very high numbers do not include time spent in front of screens for school or homework, nor do they include all the time adolescents spend paying only partial attention to events in the real world while thinking about what they're missing on social media or waiting for their phones to ping. Pew reports that in 2022, one-third of teens said they were on one of the major social-media sites "almost constantly," and nearly half said the same of the internet in general. For these heavy users, nearly every waking hour is an hour absorbed, in full or in part, by their devices.

In Thoreau's terms, how much of life is exchanged for all this screen time? Arguably, most of it. Everything else in an adolescent's day must get squeezed down or eliminated entirely to make room for the vast amount of content that is consumed, and for the hundreds of "friends," "followers," and other network connections that must be serviced with texts, posts, comments, likes, snaps, and direct messages. I recently surveyed my students at NYU, and most of them reported that the very first thing they do when they open their eyes in the morning is check their texts, direct messages, and social-media feeds. It's also the last thing they do before they close their eyes at night. And it's a lot of what they do in between.

The amount of time that adolescents spend sleeping declined in the early 2010s, and many studies tie sleep loss directly to the use of devices around bedtime, particularly when they're used to scroll through social media. Exercise declined, too, which is unfortunate because exercise, like sleep, improves both mental and physical health. Book reading has been declining for decades, pushed aside by digital alternatives, but the decline, like so much else, sped up in the early 2010 s. With passive entertainment always available, adolescent minds likely wander less than they used to; contemplation and imagination might be placed on the list of things winnowed down or crowded out.

But perhaps the most devastating cost of the new phone-based childhood was the collapse of time spent interacting with other people face-to-face. A study of how Americans spend their time found that, before 2010, young people (ages 15 to 24) reported spending far more time with their friends (about two hours a day, on average, not counting time together at school) than did older people (who spent just 30 to 60 minutes with friends). Time with friends began decreasing for young people in the 2000s, but the drop accelerated in the 2010s, while it barely changed for older people. By 2019, young people's time with friends had dropped to just 67 minutes a day. It turns out that Gen Z had been socially distancing for many years and had mostly completed the project by the time COVID-19 struck.
Read: What happens when kids don't see their peers for months
You might question the importance of this decline. After all, isn't much of this online time spent interacting with friends through texting, social media, and multiplayer video games? Isn't that just as good?

Some of it surely is, and virtual interactions offer unique benefits too, especially for young people who are geographically or socially isolated. But in general, the virtual world lacks many of the features that make human interactions in the real world nutritious, as we might say, for physical, social, and emotional development. In particular, real-world relationships and social interactions are characterized by four features-typical for hundreds of thousands of years-that online interactions either distort or erase.

First, real-world interactions are embodied, meaning that we use our hands and facial expressions to communicate, and we learn to respond to the body language of others. Virtual interactions, in contrast, mostly rely on language alone. No matter how many emojis are offered as compensation, the elimination of communication channels for which we have eons of evolutionary programming is likely to produce adults who are less comfortable and less skilled at interacting in person.

Second, real-world interactions are synchronous; they happen at the same time. As a result, we learn subtle cues about timing and conversational turn taking. Synchronous interactions make us feel closer to the other person because that's what getting "in sync" does. Texts, posts, and many other virtual interactions lack synchrony. There is less real laughter, more room for misinterpretation, and more stress after a comment that gets no immediate response.

Third, real-world interactions primarily involve one‐to‐one communication, or sometimes one-to-several. But many virtual communications are broadcast to a potentially huge audience. Online, each person can engage in dozens of asynchronous interactions in parallel, which interferes with the depth achieved in all of them. The sender's motivations are different, too: With a large audience, one's reputation is always on the line; an error or poor performance can damage social standing with large numbers of peers. These communications thus tend to be more performative and anxiety-inducing than one-to-one conversations.

Finally, real-world interactions usually take place within communities that have a high bar for entry and exit, so people are strongly motivated to invest in relationships and repair rifts when they happen. But in many virtual networks, people can easily block others or quit when they are displeased. Relationships within such networks are usually more disposable.
From the September 2015 issue: The coddling of the American mind
These unsatisfying and anxiety-producing features of life online should be recognizable to most adults. Online interactions can bring out antisocial behavior that people would never display in their offline communities. But if life online takes a toll on adults, just imagine what it does to adolescents in the early years of puberty, when their "experience expectant" brains are rewiring based on feedback from their social interactions.

Kids going through puberty online are likely to experience far more social comparison, self-consciousness, public shaming, and chronic anxiety than adolescents in previous generations, which could potentially set developing brains into a habitual state of defensiveness. The brain contains systems that are specialized for approach (when opportunities beckon) and withdrawal (when threats appear or seem likely). People can be in what we might call "discover mode" or "defend mode" at any moment, but generally not both. The two systems together form a mechanism for quickly adapting to changing conditions, like a thermostat that can activate either a heating system or a cooling system as the temperature fluctuates. Some people's internal thermostats are generally set to discover mode, and they flip into defend mode only when clear threats arise. These people tend to see the world as full of opportunities. They are happier and less anxious. Other people's internal thermostats are generally set to defend mode, and they flip into discover mode only when they feel unusually safe. They tend to see the world as full of threats and are more prone to anxiety and depressive disorders.

Percentage of U.S. college freshmen reporting various kinds of disabilities and disorders (source: Higher Education Research Institute)

A simple way to understand the differences between Gen Z and previous generations is that people born in and after 1996 have internal thermostats that were shifted toward defend mode. This is why life on college campuses changed so suddenly when Gen Z arrived, beginning around 2014. Students began requesting "safe spaces" and trigger warnings. They were highly sensitive to "microaggressions" and sometimes claimed that words were "violence." These trends mystified those of us in older generations at the time, but in hindsight, it all makes sense. Gen Z students found words, ideas, and ambiguous social encounters more threatening than had previous generations of students because we had fundamentally altered their psychological development.

The debate around adolescents' use of smartphones and social media typically revolves around mental health, and understandably so. But the harms that have resulted from transforming childhood so suddenly and heedlessly go far beyond mental health. I've touched on some of them-social awkwardness, reduced self-confidence, and a more sedentary childhood. Here are three additional harms.

Fragmented Attention, Disrupted Learning

Staying on task while sitting at a computer is hard enough for an adult with a fully developed prefrontal cortex. It is far more difficult for adolescents in front of their laptop trying to do homework. They are probably less intrinsically motivated to stay on task. They're certainly less able, given their undeveloped prefrontal cortex, and hence it's easy for any company with an app to lure them away with an offer of social validation or entertainment. Their phones are pinging constantly- one study found that the typical adolescent now gets 237 notifications a day, roughly 15 every waking hour. Sustained attention is essential for doing almost anything big, creative, or valuable, yet young people find their attention chopped up into little bits by notifications offering the possibility of high-pleasure, low-effort digital experiences.

Addiction and Social Withdrawal

The neural basis of behavioral addiction to social media or video games is not exactly the same as chemical addiction to cocaine or opioids. Nonetheless, they all involve abnormally heavy and sustained activation of dopamine neurons and reward pathways. Over time, the brain adapts to these high levels of dopamine; when the child is not engaged in digital activity, their brain doesn't have enough dopamine, and the child experiences withdrawal symptoms. These generally include anxiety, insomnia, and intense irritability. Kids with these kinds of behavioral addictions often become surly and aggressive, and withdraw from their families into their bedrooms and devices.

Social-media and gaming platforms were designed to hook users. How successful are they? How many kids suffer from digital addictions?

The main addiction risks for boys seem to be video games and porn. " Internet gaming disorder," which was added to the main diagnosis manual of psychiatry in 2013 as a condition for further study, describes "significant impairment or distress" in several aspects of life, along with many hallmarks of addiction, including an inability to reduce usage despite attempts to do so. Estimates for the prevalence of IGD range from 7 to 15 percent among adolescent boys and young men. As for porn, a nationally representative survey of American adults published in 2019 found that 7 percent of American men agreed or strongly agreed with the statement "I am addicted to pornography"-and the rates were higher for the youngest men.

Girls have much lower rates of addiction to video games and porn, but they use social media more intensely than boys do. A study of teens in 29 nations found that between 5 and 15 percent of adolescents engage in what is called "problematic social media use," which includes symptoms such as preoccupation, withdrawal symptoms, neglect of other areas of life, and lying to parents and friends about time spent on social media. That study did not break down results by gender, but many others have found that rates of "problematic use" are higher for girls.
Jonathan Haidt: The dangerous experiment on teen girls
I don't want to overstate the risks: Most teens do not become addicted to their phones and video games. But across multiple studies and across genders, rates of problematic use come out in the ballpark of 5 to 15 percent. Is there any other consumer product that parents would let their children use relatively freely if they knew that something like one in 10 kids would end up with a pattern of habitual and compulsive use that disrupted various domains of life and looked a lot like an addiction?

The Decay of Wisdom and the Loss of Meaning

During that crucial sensitive period for cultural learning, from roughly ages 9 through 15, we should be especially thoughtful about who is socializing our children for adulthood. Instead, that's when most kids get their first smartphone and sign themselves up (with or without parental permission) to consume rivers of content from random strangers. Much of that content is produced by other adolescents, in blocks of a few minutes or a few seconds.

This rerouting of enculturating content has created a generation that is largely cut off from older generations and, to some extent, from the accumulated wisdom of humankind, including knowledge about how to live a flourishing life. Adolescents spend less time steeped in their local or national culture. They are coming of age in a confusing, placeless, ahistorical maelstrom of 30-second stories curated by algorithms designed to mesmerize them. Without solid knowledge of the past and the filtering of good ideas from bad--a process that plays out over many generations--young people will be more prone to believe whatever terrible ideas become popular around them, which might explain why v ideos showing young people reacting positively to Osama bin Laden's thoughts about America were trending on TikTok last fall.

All this is made worse by the fact that so much of digital public life is an unending supply of micro dramas about somebody somewhere in our country of 340 million people who did something that can fuel an outrage cycle, only to be pushed aside by the next. It doesn't add up to anything and leaves behind only a distorted sense of human nature and affairs.

When our public life becomes fragmented, ephemeral, and incomprehensible, it is a recipe for anomie, or normlessness. The great French sociologist Émile Durkheim showed long ago that a society that fails to bind its people together with some shared sense of sacredness and common respect for rules and norms is not a society of great individual freedom; it is, rather, a place where disoriented individuals have difficulty setting goals and exerting themselves to achieve them. Durkheim argued that anomie was a major driver of suicide rates in European countries. Modern scholars continue to draw on his work to understand suicide rates today.

Percentage of U.S. high-school seniors who agreed with the statement "Life often seems meaningless." (Source: Monitoring the Future)

Durkheim's observations are crucial for understanding what happened in the early 2010s. A long-running survey of American teens found that, from 1990 to 2010, high-school seniors became slightly less likely to agree with statements such as "Life often feels meaningless." But as soon as they adopted a phone-based life and many began to live in the whirlpool of social media, where no stability can be found, every measure of despair increased. From 2010 to 2019, the number who agreed that their lives felt "meaningless" increased by about 70 percent, to more than one in five.

6. Young People Don't Like Their Phone-Based Lives

How can I be confident that the epidemic of adolescent mental illness was kicked off by the arrival of the phone-based childhood? Skeptics point to other events as possible culprits, including the 2008 global financial crisis, global warming, the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting and the subsequent active-shooter drills, rising academic pressures, and the opioid epidemic. But while these events might have been contributing factors in some countries, none can explain both the timing and international scope of the disaster.

An additional source of evidence comes from Gen Z itself. With all the talk of regulating social media, raising age limits, and getting phones out of schools, you might expect to find many members of Gen Z writing and speaking out in opposition. I've looked for such arguments and found hardly any. In contrast, many young adults tell stories of devastation.

Freya India, a 24-year-old British essayist who writes about girls, explains how social-media sites carry girls off to unhealthy places: "It seems like your child is simply watching some makeup tutorials, following some mental health influencers, or experimenting with their identity. But let me tell you: they are on a conveyor belt to someplace bad. Whatever insecurity or vulnerability they are struggling with, they will be pushed further and further into it." She continues:

Gen Z were the guinea pigs in this uncontrolled global social experiment. We were the first to have our vulnerabilities and insecurities fed into a machine that magnified and refracted them back at us, all the time, before we had any sense of who we were. We didn't just grow up with algorithms. They raised us. They rearranged our faces. Shaped our identities. Convinced us we were sick.

Rikki Schlott, a 23-year-old American journalist and co-author of The Canceling of the American Mind, writes,

The day-to-day life of a typical teen or tween today would be unrecognizable to someone who came of age before the smartphone arrived. Zoomers are spending an average of 9 hours daily in this screen-time doom loop-desperate to forget the gaping holes they're bleeding out of, even if just for ... 9 hours a day. Uncomfortable silence could be time to ponder why they're so miserable in the first place. Drowning it out with algorithmic white noise is far easier.

A 27-year-old man who spent his adolescent years addicted (his word) to video games and pornography sent me this reflection on what that did to him:

I missed out on a lot of stuff in life-a lot of socialization. I feel the effects now: meeting new people, talking to people. I feel that my interactions are not as smooth and fluid as I want. My knowledge of the world (geography, politics, etc.) is lacking. I didn't spend time having conversations or learning about sports. I often feel like a hollow operating system.

Or consider what Facebook found in a research project involving focus groups of young people, revealed in 2021 by the whistleblower Frances Haugen: "Teens blame Instagram for increases in the rates of anxiety and depression among teens," an internal document said. "This reaction was unprompted and consistent across all groups."

How can it be that an entire generation is hooked on consumer products that so few praise and so many ultimately regret using? Because smartphones and especially social media have put members of Gen Z and their parents into a series of collective-action traps. Once you understand the dynamics of these traps, the escape routes become clear.

7. Collective-Action Problems

Social-media companies such as Meta, TikTok, and Snap are often compared to tobacco companies, but that's not really fair to the tobacco industry. It's true that companies in both industries marketed harmful products to children and tweaked their products for maximum customer retention (that is, addiction), but there's a big difference: Teens could and did choose, in large numbers, not to smoke. Even at the peak of teen cigarette use, in 1997, nearly two-thirds of high-school students did not smoke.

Social media, in contrast, applies a lot more pressure on nonusers, at a much younger age and in a more insidious way. Once a few students in any middle school lie about their age and open accounts at age 11 or 12, they start posting photos and comments about themselves and other students. Drama ensues. The pressure on everyone else to join becomes intense. Even a girl who knows, consciously, that Instagram can foster beauty obsession, anxiety, and eating disorders might sooner take those risks than accept the seeming certainty of being out of the loop, clueless, and excluded. And indeed, if she resists while most of her classmates do not, she might, in fact, be marginalized, which puts her at risk for anxiety and depression, though via a different pathway than the one taken by those who use social media heavily. In this way, social media accomplishes a remarkable feat: It even harms adolescents who do not use it.
From the May 2022 issue: Jonathan Haidt on why the past 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid
A recent study led by the University of Chicago economist Leonardo Bursztyn captured the dynamics of the social-media trap precisely. The researchers recruited more than 1,000 college students and asked them how much they'd need to be paid to deactivate their accounts on either Instagram or TikTok for four weeks. That's a standard economist's question to try to compute the net value of a product to society. On average, students said they'd need to be paid roughly $50 ($59 for TikTok, $47 for Instagram) to deactivate whichever platform they were asked about. Then the experimenters told the students that they were going to try to get most of the others in their school to deactivate that same platform, offering to pay them to do so as well, and asked, Now how much would you have to be paid to deactivate, if most others did so? The answer, on average, was less than zero. In each case, most students were willing to pay to have that happen.

Social media is all about network effects. Most students are only on it because everyone else is too. Most of them would prefer that nobody be on these platforms. Later in the study, students were asked directly, "Would you prefer to live in a world without Instagram [or TikTok]?" A majority of students said yes--58 percent for each app.

This is the textbook definition of what social scientists call a collective-action problem. It's what happens when a group would be better off if everyone in the group took a particular action, but each actor is deterred from acting, because unless the others do the same, the personal cost outweighs the benefit. Fishermen considering limiting their catch to avoid wiping out the local fish population are caught in this same kind of trap. If no one else does it too, they just lose profit.

Cigarettes trapped individual smokers with a biological addiction. Social media has trapped an entire generation in a collective-action problem. Early app developers deliberately and knowingly exploited the psychological weaknesses and insecurities of young people to pressure them to consume a product that, upon reflection, many wish they could use less, or not at all.

8. Four Norms to Break Four Traps

Young people and their parents are stuck in at least four collective-action traps. Each is hard to escape for an individual family, but escape becomes much easier if families, schools, and communities coordinate and act together. Here are four norms that would roll back the phone-based childhood. I believe that any community that adopts all four will see substantial improvements in youth mental health within two years.

No smartphones before high school

The trap here is that each child thinks they need a smartphone because "everyone else" has one, and many parents give in because they don't want their child to feel excluded. But if no one else had a smartphone-or even if, say, only half of the child's sixth-grade class had one-parents would feel more comfortable providing a basic flip phone (or no phone at all). Delaying round-the-clock internet access until ninth grade (around age 14) as a national or community norm would help to protect adolescents during the very vulnerable first few years of puberty. According to a 2022 British study, these are the years when social-media use is most correlated with poor mental health. Family policies about tablets, laptops, and video-game consoles should be aligned with smartphone restrictions to prevent overuse of other screen activities.

No social media before 16

The trap here, as with smartphones, is that each adolescent feels a strong need to open accounts on TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, and other platforms primarily because that's where most of their peers are posting and gossiping. But if the majority of adolescents were not on these accounts until they were 16, families and adolescents could more easily resist the pressure to sign up. The delay would not mean that kids younger than 16 could never watch videos on TikTok or YouTube-only that they could not open accounts, give away their data, post their own content, and let algorithms get to know them and their preferences.

Most schools claim that they ban phones, but this usually just means that students aren't supposed to take their phone out of their pocket during class. Research shows that most students do use their phones during class time. They also use them during lunchtime, free periods, and breaks between classes--times when students could and should be interacting with their classmates face-to-face. The only way to get students' minds off their phones during the school day is to require all students to put their phones (and other devices that can send or receive texts) into a phone locker or locked pouch at the start of the day. Schools that have gone phone-free always seem to report that it has improved the culture, making students more attentive in class and more interactive with one another. Published studies back them up.

More independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world

Many parents are afraid to give their children the level of independence and responsibility they themselves enjoyed when they were young, even though rates of homicide, drunk driving, and other physical threats to children are way down in recent decades. Part of the fear comes from the fact that parents look at each other to determine what is normal and therefore safe, and they see few examples of families acting as if a 9-year-old can be trusted to walk to a store without a chaperone. But if many parents started sending their children out to play or run errands, then the norms of what is safe and accepted would change quickly. So would ideas about what constitutes "good parenting." And if more parents trusted their children with more responsibility--for example, by asking their kids to do more to help out, or to care for others--then the pervasive sense of uselessness now found in surveys of high-school students might begin to dissipate.

It would be a mistake to overlook this fourth norm. If parents don't replace screen time with real-world experiences involving friends and independent activity, then banning devices will feel like deprivation, not the opening up of a world of opportunities.

The main reason why the phone-based childhood is so harmful is because it pushes aside everything else. Smartphones are experience blockers. Our ultimate goal should not be to remove screens entirely, nor should it be to return childhood to exactly the way it was in 1960. Rather, it should be to create a version of childhood and adolescence that keeps young people anchored in the real world while flourishing in the digital age.

9. What Are We Waiting For?

An essential function of government is to solve collective-action problems. Congress could solve or help solve the ones I've highlighted-for instance, by raising the age of "internet adulthood" to 16 and requiring tech companies to keep underage children off their sites.

In recent decades, however, Congress has not been good at addressing public concerns when the solutions would displease a powerful and deep-pocketed industry. Governors and state legislators have been much more effective, and their successes might let us evaluate how well various reforms work. But the bottom line is that to change norms, we're going to need to do most of the work ourselves, in neighborhood groups, schools, and other communities.
Read: Why Congress keeps failing to protect kids online
There are now hundreds of organizations--most of them started by mothers who saw what smartphones had done to their children--that are working to roll back the phone-based childhood or promote a more independent, real-world childhood. (I have assembled a list of many of them.) One that I co-founded, at LetGrow.org, suggests a variety of simple programs for parents or schools, such as play club (schools keep the playground open at least one day a week before or after school, and kids sign up for phone-free, mixed-age, unstructured play as a regular weekly activity) and the Let Grow Experience (a series of homework assignments in which students--with their parents' consent--choose something to do on their own that they've never done before, such as walk the dog, climb a tree, walk to a store, or cook dinner).

Even without the help of organizations, parents could break their families out of collective-action traps if they coordinated with the parents of their children's friends. Together they could create common smartphone rules and organize unsupervised play sessions or encourage hangouts at a home, park, or shopping mall.

Parents are fed up with what childhood has become. Many are tired of having daily arguments about technologies that were designed to grab hold of their children's attention and not let go. But the phone-based childhood is not inevitable.

The four norms I have proposed cost almost nothing to implement, they cause no clear harm to anyone, and while they could be supported by new legislation, they can be instilled even without it. We can begin implementing all of them right away, this year, especially in communities with good cooperation between schools and parents. A single memo from a principal asking parents to delay smartphones and social media, in support of the school's effort to improve mental health by going phone free, would catalyze collective action and reset the community's norms.

We didn't know what we were doing in the early 2010s. Now we do. It's time to end the phone-based childhood.
This article is adapted from Jonathan Haidt's forthcoming book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.

​When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

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We’ve trawled the depths of TikTok, the nichest corners of the internet, London’s sweatiest clubs and local shopping centres to find out what all the cool kids are wearing. From mall rats and happy campers to medieval mystics and Depop drama queens, here’s where the youth are now pledging their…

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Digital Identity Management on Social Media: Exploring the Factors That Influence Personal Information Disclosure on Social Media

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School of Technology, Ghana Institute of Management and Public Administration (GIMPA), Accra 039 5028, Ghana

School of Public Services and Governance, Ghana Institute of Management and Public Administration (GIMPA), Accra 039 5028, Ghana

School of Economics and Management, Jiangxi University of Science and Technology, Ganzhou 330098, China

Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.

1. Introduction

In the last few years, social media has become part of the lives of people around the world. One of the most profound changes today is the increase in mobility of portable yet powerful wireless devices capable of communicating via several different kinds of wireless networks of varying link-level characteristics. The Internet and social media have become the most important achievement of modern society and particularly in Africa, they have helped to improve access to education, information technology, science and entertainment [ 1]. It is not surprising that the Global Digital Report (2019) describes social media as the ultimate representation of globalization. Social media continues to spread because its utility, and is supported by new trends and developments in technology and also by the improvement in knowledge and skills of social media users [ 2]. Nonetheless, as users enjoy the convenience offered by these platforms, service providers collect, analyse, and most often share personal information of users [ 3, 4]. Accordingly, information security has become a critical issue in society and therefore a major topic in both research and practice [ 4, 5].

About 50% of the world's nearly 3.80 billion population are social media users. Similarly, more than 5.19 billion people globally use mobile phones regularly, with user numbers up by 124 million (2.4 %) over the past year. The trend is similar across all the regions of the world. For example, out of the total population of 1.30 billion in Africa, 80 percent use mobile phones, and active social media users grew by 13 percent (25 million people). The use of social media on mobile devices also grew by 17 percent (30 million Africans) [ 6]. According to the report, Ghana has about six million active social media users and 20 million mobile phone users and ten million using the Internet. Though the level of development of Ghana is more than the average SSA country, citizens complain of economic hardships and lack of employment, but are able to raise the resources needed to purchase Internet data, smartphones, computers-to keep themselves active on the Internet, particularly social media. This has earned Ghana the 9th position globally in terms of hours spent on social media. Ghanaians spend considerably longer hours online than their African counterparts, which could mean that the West African nation spends significant amount of cash on Internet bundles for accessing social media. Social media users are offered tremendous opportunity to exercise informational self-determination [ 7], which seems to have contributed to the unprecedented adoption and use of social media by individuals and organizations. This has also been driven by the many expected benefits of social media, particularly the use of social media as a participatory and mobilizing platform for electoral democracy [ 8]. The 2016 presidential elections in Ghana attest to the growing power of social media, particularly Facebook, in inducing participation among potential voters.

The issue of security of identity even becomes more important when one considers the fact that the global digital growth shows no signs of slowing down, with about a million people around the world going online every day. This trend will continue because despite the problems of hacking, fake news and all other negative connotations associated with going online, around the globe people embrace the Internet because of the perceived social, political, and economic benefits [ 6]. This is especially the case for young adults who have different attitudes towards information security practices [ 9]. However, the requirement for the security of personal identity is not adequately met in networks, especially given the emergence of ubiquitous computing devices that are mobile and use wireless communications [ 10]. Although previous studies on social media have underscored its pivotal role in shaping interactions, the contextual factors in digital identity management on social media have not been well articulated. Digital identity is a keystone that can ensure that the Internet infrastructure is strong enough to meet basic expectations for not just service and functionality, but security, privacy, and reliability [ 11]. Personal information disclosure is one such digital identity issue that requires thorough interrogation. Shibuya [ 12] put it simply that digitized world requires identity protection. According to Pavlou [ 5], information privacy should be studied as a multi-level concept, as there are promising research directions for advancing the theme. Syd et al., [ 13] posited that given the paucity of research on identity management on social media, a value perspective is required to determine gaps between what social media users want and what social media sites offer through their current security and privacy controls [ 13]. Chang and Heo also note that while many social media studies have explored the degree to which social media users reveal their personal information, there has not been a systematic analysis of the factors that might explain users' self-disclosure on social media [ 14, 15, 16]. This gap motivates the study.

Obviously, the development of services and the growing demand for resources sharing among users from different organizations with some level of affinity have motivated the creation of Identity Management Systems [ 17]. As noted by Windley when it comes to enabling a truly virtual world that can accommodate the complexities of human behavior, nothing is more important than identity. Indeed, the network applications together with the ubiquitous connectivity to free transactions, communications, and other activities from physical constraints create a new set of requirements [ 18]. The purpose of this study is to explore the antecedents of personal information disclosure on social media. The central research question is, "What factors influence users' decision to disclose personal information on Social Media?" Addressing this question will effectively enrich current understanding of the antecedents of personal information disclosure on social media and information privacy discourse in Information System research. It is expected that findings of the study could contribute to the extant literature on digital identity management and more importantly lead to evidence informed policy on social media to enhance its positive effects and possibly reduce negative impacts.

The rest of the paper are organized as follows: the next section provides an overview and conceptual foundations of social media. We then proceed to explain the concepts of identity and identity management and the major user concerns in their social media engagements including the theoretical lenses of the paper. The methodology and the results of the study are discussed respectively followed by conclusions and suggestions for further studies.

2. Background and Related Work

In this section a brief overview of the key concepts are discussed after which the theoretical and empirical literature are presented. The key concepts to be discussed are Social media, self-disclosure, and digital identity management.

2.1. Overview of Social Media

Harlow observed that social media technologies provide opportunity for real time user participation in societal discourse [ 25]. Social media innovation offers users a fast, easy and relatively cheap collection, aggregation and analysis of large volumes of data, with little or sometimes, no involvement of the data originator and/or the data subject [ 26, 27]. Besides the relative ease of such interactions, better content, reach and richness, offer citizens the opportunity to contribute to various forms of discourse. The social media evolution began in 1995, with the emergence of a platform called Classmates [ 28]. Subsequently, social network platforms like Friendster, a dating platform, LinkedIn, a platform for managing users' professional identity emerged in 2003 and MySpace for content creation and sharing. Subsequently, Facebook that has become one of the dominant social media platforms emerged in the year 2004, followed by YouTube in 2005 and there have been several variations of social media innovations [ 29, 30, 31].

In Africa, the most popular social media platforms are Facebook (69.8%), YouTube (16.9), LinkedIn (1%), Pinterest (7.3%), Twitter (4.3%), and Instagram (0.9%) [ 6]. Though the trend is not very different in Ghana, there are slight variations. For example, though Facebook is the most popular, it is used by just about half of social media users (47%), 21% for Twitter, 18% for Pinterest, 10% for Instagram and 3.2% for YouTube [ 1, 6]. In Africa more generally, and Ghana specifically, social media continues to spread because its utility is supported by new trends and developments in technology and because of the improvement in knowledge and skills of social media users. This is especially true as new and many forms of online content, platforms and websites continue to emerge for political communication and more importantly to improve the quality of governance [ 32, 33]. It is worthy of mention that in a few instances, social media has been used by some African governments to monitor and control their citizens so that instead of becoming a liberating force, it has become a conduit for surveillance and electoral manipulation [ 34, 35, 36].

2.2. Self Disclosure

On the whole, social media like most things in life have both benefits and risks and one of the basic challenges confronting users of the several social media platforms is how to protect their privacy and consequently how much they could disclose of themselves online. Many theoretical frameworks have been used to explain the factors that drive self-disclosure including the self-determination theory, social contract theory, social exchange theory and the uses and gratification theory. In essence, self-disclosure refers to the communication behavior in which an individual wilfully reveals himself to others [ 40]. Revealing themselves in this sense involves their thoughts, feelings and experiences which help to maintain online social networks [ 41]. From this perspective, it is important to state that self-disclosure not only helps to initiate social interactions, but also facilitates richer social contacts and friendships in the long-term [ 42].

The question is what are the factors that drive these behaviors to disclose or otherwise? Consistent with the social contract and social exchange theories, the decision to disclose or otherwise is perceived through a cost-benefit analysis where a net benefit leads to disclosure and a net cost leads to withdrawal or non-disclosure [ 43, 44]. Obviously, the decision would be based on the perceived risk or benefit associated with disclosure. Some empirical studies indicate that people are attracted to those who grant them rewards when initiating interpersonal contact on Internet dating sites or perceive more benefits than risks are more likely to disclose personal information [ 45, 46]. This supports the view of Zhang et al. (2019) that self-disclosure is usually driven by the estimation of costs and benefits between parties in the relationship. Also, the relationship between privacy attitudes and self-disclosure behaviors has largely been explained by the notion that individuals regulate their exchange of information based on privacy control mechanisms [ 47, 48]. More intriguing is the fact that self-disclosure not only helps to initiate social interactions, but also facilitates richer social contacts and friendships in the long-term [ 42]. Thus, the very survival and quality of many of the social media platforms is determined by the level of disclosure.

The underlying principle of all the theories discussed is the idea of trust, which many authors suggest has the most important influence on information disclosure [ 52, 53, 54, 55]. This is understandable because of not only the extensive use, but more importantly the impersonal nature and the uncertainty of open Internet [ 53]. This is supportive of Yu et al.'s finding that perceived privacy risks of users have stronger negative impact on disclosure intention and behavior on instrumental platforms, compared with emotional platforms [ 4]. Many studies also do show that the biggest constraint to the growth of social media is the issue of trust or the public's fear about security and privacy online [ 16]. Some others also report that trust has the most important influence on information disclosure [ 53, 54]. Indeed, several studies of interpersonal exchange situations have confirmed that trust is a precondition for self-disclosure because it reduces the perceived risks involved in revealing private information [ 56, 57, 58, 59].

In effect, what is being disclosed is the identity of the user of the social media, which refers to the qualities and characteristics that make an entity definable, distinguishable, and recognizable compared to other entities [ 60]. Or as Bellini et al. [ 11] describe it, identity consists of a set of information associated with a specific entity and it is usually a reflection of what is generally known by those with whom they interact [ 61]. That entity or agent may be a person or individual, organization, application, or device that exists online. Additionally, Bellini et al. observe that when it comes to enabling the virtual world, nothing is more important than identity in explaining the depth of human behavior [ 11]. Identity management therefore becomes the cornerstone of Internet infrastructure to ensure that not only expectations are being met in terms of service and functionality but also security, privacy, and reliability. Identity in the digital world is digital records that represent a user which are usually saved and managed in a standard format by entities that provide those identity information. The concept of identity is therefore vital in the formation of better knowledge of people and in trust building, since it provides the foundation for socio-economic interactions. Such definitions have widened the concept of identity to include identifiers such as login names and pseudonyms. Identity in information systems therefore consists of peculiar traits, attributes, and preferences that used to provide personalized services to users [ 62]. Such tweets, posts, likes, email trails or tags produce a digital footprint that can be connected perpetually to users digital identity [ 63]. Such digital footprints usually released during user interactions and exchanges on social media are sometimes referred to as digital personas or partial identity, as illustrated in Figure 1 [ 64].

The diagram ( Figure 1) clearly shows that the sets of identity attributes and identifiers used for specific transactions on the Internet may vary considerably depending on the context [ 65]. Effective identification is therefore, based on users' ability to demonstrate knowledge (something you know-e.g., a password); possession of a token or credential (something you have-e.g., driver's license); physiological characteristics or features (something you are-e.g., gender, facial features, signature, fingerprint), or a combination of all or any of the three [ 66, 67].

2.3. Digital Identity Management

The architecture of the Internet allows users to disguise their digital persona resulting in the quest for reliable means of ascertaining identities with certainty [ 68]. To ensure that data subjects are unmistakably identifiable, identity tokens must be tamper resistant, or difficult to forge after they are issued. Digital identity therefore, removes the requirement for parties to be present during transactions and interactions. Such a disembodiment of identification processes results in wider distribution of personal information [ 69]. Cameron proposed the laws of identity as design principles ( Table 1), that should form the foundation for constructing the identity [ 68]. The paper posited that adherence to such principles offers user control and the ability to influence how their personal information is used for secondary purposes. Non-conformance to such design principles raises user concerns which can influence their engagement on social media.

2.4. User Concerns on Social Media

Various sophisticated tools enable users to collect, aggregate and analyse large volumes of personal information on social media. Chatzakou et al., for instance, proposed a machine learning-based detection model to identify multiple virtual identities of the same natural person [ 70]. Such innovations are usually intended to enhance the notion of self-presentation and informational self-determination. In spite of such unprecedented sophistication, various studies have explored the risks associated with personal information disclosure on social media [ 71]. Such legitimate user concerns often hinder information disclosure on social media, compelling users to constantly examine their natural quest for connectivity and user experience, and a requirement to disclose sensitive information. Moreover, although users rely on a variety of cues in determining how to connect and interact with others on social media, not all of such cues are credible because the architecture of the Internet makes it difficult to know with certainty, the identity of interacting parties. This is because users observed behavior on social media platforms are usually different from what is stated [ 72].

3. Conceptual Framework

According to the self-determination theory (SDT), needs are the most important determinants of human behavior [ 78]. As noted by Deci and Ryan, the main aim of human behaviors is to satisfy the basic psychological needs throughout the lifetime. In a sense, SDT links human motivation, personality, and the actual functioning of an individual [ 78, 79]. The SDT therefore provides a unique perspective to examine the relationship between peoples' needs and their social media behavior [ 80]. Primarily, the SDT is centered on the fundamental humanistic assumption that individuals naturally seek growth and self-organization [ 81]. Shen et al. describe the psychological needs as the innate psychological nutrients essential for ongoing growth, integrity, and well-being [ 80]. Deci and Ryan's SDT identifies three basic psychological needs as competence, relatedness, and autonomy. These three elements when satisfied yield enhanced self-motivation and mental health and when thwarted lead to diminished motivation and well-being [ 82].

Competence is the ability to control the outcome of an activity and experience mastery of that task, which relates to the need to perform successful social interactions with skills and ability. Relatedness is associated with the universal need to be connected to an experience caring for others and autonomy refers to the need to decide one's own behavior and act freely in accordance with their interests and beliefs [ 7, 78, 83]. For example, autonomy entails ability to act with a sense of volition and having the experience of choice. Accordingly, in social media engagements, individuals must have the ability to prevent sensitive information from one context (e.g., the employment data, medical records, relationships) from proliferating into other platforms. The information disclosure behavior on social media is therefore, a function of users' ability to evaluate the specific risks and benefits of the online transaction [ 84]. Many studies do provide support for these psychological needs, digital literacy skills and self-information disclosure. For example, Boyd & Hargittai report that Internet users with high level of skills update their privacy settings more frequently, whereas the reverse is reported for those with minimal skills [ 29, 85]. Demirbaş-Çelik and Keklik in a study of high school students in Turkey report that each psychological need (competence, relatedness and autonomy) partially mediated the relationship between stability and presence of meaning in life [ 86]. On the other hand, only competence and relatedness partially mediated the relationship between plasticity and search of meaning [ 83]. The findings suggest that competent users are more likely to self-determine how their personal information is used on social media. Similarly, Demirbas-Celik examines the roles of the satisfaction of basic psychological needs and meaning in life (MIL) on high school students' happiness and demonstrate that autonomy, competence, relatedness and MIL predict social well-being significantly [ 86]. In a related study, Martela et al. found that competence, relatedness, autonomy and beneficence each independently accounted for variance in MIL [ 87]. Likewise, Weinstein et al. reported a link between psychological needs and meaning in life [ 88].

Figure 2 provides a pictorial representation of the self-determination theory. The cardinality of autonomy, relatedness and competence in personal information disclosure behavior on social media show that, individuals will disclose personal information if they possess understanding of the platform. The disclosure is a means to show intimacy and relatedness, or the user is not under duress to disclose personal information.

Moreover, Hoffmann et al. identified a cognitive coping mechanism that enables users to overcome or ignore privacy concerns and engage in online information self-disclosure [ 89]. Also the integrity and openness of social media platform can influence users' information disclosure behavior [ 90]. Trust of social media platforms is therefore predicated on integrity and openness. We therefore argue that, the key factors that influence personal information disclosure on social media are: competence, relatedness, autonomy, integrity and awareness of the risks and its consequence as illustrated in Figure 3. The methodology employed to achieve the research objectives are described next.

4. Methods

A variation of convergent parallel mixed methods design was adopted in this study to explore the factors that influence personal information disclosure on social media. This method is suitable for developing a complete understanding and a comprehensive view of the research domain and the research problem [ 91]. This research design involves a concurrent use of quantitative and qualitative elements in the research processes, independent analysis of the two components, and joint interpretations of the results [ 91, 92]. The quantitative strand involved a convenient sample of two hundred and fifty (250) students from tertiary institutions in Ghana who completed a carefully designed instrument. Respondents provided biographic data and were required to select personal information attributes they were willing to disclose on a social media. Given the validation issues with respect to the limited number of respondents, the qualitative analysis was carefully designed to provide rich explanations of the findings from the quantitative data and analysis [ 93, 94].

With respect to the qualitative strand of the study, Venkatesh et al. specified six types of social network analysis for which qualitative research methods will be suitable. Such social media analytical categories include; exploration of networks, examination of network practices, network interpretations, network effects, network dynamics and access to actors and networks [ 93, 94]. The qualitative analysis is therefore justified since this study examines user behavior and practices on social media [ 93, 94]. Eighty-six (86) students (both undergraduate and graduate) participated in the eight focus group discussions. A purposive sampling technique was adopted in the nomination of the participants of the focus group. The age groups and gender were carefully considered in the formation of the focus groups to encourage frank and open discussion of the issues raised (See Table 2).

Prior to each of the focus group discussions, participants were briefed on digital identity management and information disclosure issues on social media. The discussion covered the issues that participants take into consideration in their social media engagements and disclosure behaviors. Participants' previous exposure, computing and social media proficiency and the benefits derived were also discussed. Responses to the questions generated probing questions from the researcher and occasionally, members of the focus group. All the focus group discussions took place in the last quarter of the year 2019. The discussions were recorded, and data were transcribed unto a Microsoft Word document. Content analysis was adopted for the focus group data analyses. The transcribed data were categorized using open coding technique for classification and tabulation into common themes as illustrated in Figure 3.

5. Discussion of Results

The study explored the factors that contribute to personal information disclosure on social media. Figure 4 is a summary of information that the respondents were willing to disclose on social media and what they were less willing to disclose on social media.

The survey revealed some interesting results. The respondents were almost unanimous in their disclosure intentions on medical history. Only about two percent of the respondents were willing to disclose their medical information on social media. This provides a clear indication of users' unwillingness to compromise on their medical records. Similarly, 90% of the respondents were unwilling to disclose their partner's profile. We also noted a disparity in the intention to disclose personal information, and the choice of media based on gender. For instance, female users are more willing to display their pictures (76%) on social media than their male counterparts (62%). Majority of the female respondents preferred Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat as their preferred Social Media Application. Interestingly, majority of the respondents who preferred Twitter and LinkedIn were males. There were some disparities in user attitudes on social media based on the age group. Respondents aged 25 and below were more willing to disclose sensitive information like phone numbers (76%), address (72%), whereas those above 25 years were more open about their political views on social media (64%).

Remarkably, glancing through Facebook accounts of many of the respondents revealed their family photos, wedding pictures and birthday wishes to partners that clearly provide indication of the nature of relationship. Similarly, phone numbers of many of the respondents were disclosed on social media although about 60% had indicated their unwillingness to disclose phone numbers indicating a mismatch between user intentions and actual behavior on social media. Responses from the eight (8) focus group discussions provided deeper insights into users' information disclosure behaviors. For instance, it revealed a lack of awareness and appreciation of the limitations of the privacy settings of social media platforms and their implications which are revealed in comments like, "I prefer simple privacy settings like that of Whatsapp" I usually don't go to the complicated settings". Clearly, simple privacy settings may not address many of the privacy concerns, whereas elaborate privacy settings like that of Facebook may be too complicated for users creating the so called "privacy dilemma."

Moreover, analysis of focus group data indicated a correlation between previous exposure and disclosure behavior of the respondents as confirmed by the following statements:

"My father used my posts on Instagram to detect a guy I was dating, it was not easy for me. Since I posted a video of a school party on Facebook, some of my relatives have accused me of being a spoilt child so I have deleted such videos from my account a certain guy started sending me suggestive pictures and even tried to blackmail me into sleeping with him. Apparently, he found my contact details on Facebook. I have since deleted my contact details and changed my cell phone number. These days I only share information with only those I know. I do not make them public."

These are clear indications that, those who have had episodes of information abuse were less willing to disclose certain information on social media. Moreover, those who appreciate the consequences of the exposure will be less willing to disclose even their names and personally identifiable information. In such situations, pseudonyms were used to conceal their true identity as indicated in the following comments:

"I usually to use nicknames on social media instead of my actual name. Even some of my close relatives do not know my Facebook account" some of my friends do not know that I am very active on social media because I do not post picture". "I only share birthday and party photos with friends on social media using nicknames."

Interestingly such respondents also complained about wrong people being suggested to them by social media platforms. Participants' awareness of risks and the consequences of the risk influence how they engage on social media. For instance, a participant hinted that

"I suspect that what I say on social media and the type of friends that I engage with on social media can affect my chances of getting a visa to certain countries". I have noticed that whenever I change my photo on LinkedIn, the system suggest friends with similar features to me. I am forced to change my picture of LinkedIn because I suspect potential employers might not take me seriously."

The study has revealed that relatedness of users, integrity of users on the platform and competence of users are the key antecedents to privacy concerns on social media. In other words, perception of lack of integrity and low user competence have the tendency to lower the level of the trustworthiness of users [ 90]. Similarly, previous exposures and relationships can influence their trustworthiness. Figure 5 clearly shows that relatedness, integrity and competence influence privacy concerns, which then informs the behavioral intention of individuals on social media and consequently, their actual social media engagements with respect to information disclosure.

The results also provided an interesting revelation about the disclosure behavior of users and the benefits derived, which is consistent with the idea that human needs traditionally are key determinants of human behavior [ 83, 95]. As noted by the self-determination theory, relatedness, competence and autonomy are not only innate but that being able to satisfy them are critical for proper functioning and well-being [ 82, 86]. On the other hand, when these three are not satisfied, it might lead to inaction or inertia, maladjustment and psychopathological symptoms [ 96]. Relating this to the social media engagement, the behavioral intention to self-disclose or not to disclose per one's privacy concerns are determined by how close a person is to achieving the optimal psychological state as it concerns relatedness, integrity, and competence.

The assumption is that satisfaction of these three basic psychological Personality Factors and Meaning in Life determine whether to engage or not to engage, and to disclose or not disclose personal information on social media. In support of the theory of reasoned action and planned behavior, Mouakket and Sun find that an individual's subjective norms have a significant impact on the desire to self-disclose personal information on social network systems in China. For instance, respondents who conduct business activities on social media often disclose their individual and organizational contact details [ 97]. Such users are usually very competent on social media, and have had extensive exposure on social media which seems to have raised their level of trustworthiness in such platforms. We therefore argue that users' ability to establish the legitimacy of parties to social media interactions are fundamental requirements in how individuals engage on social media.

6. Conclusions and Further Work

The emergence of social media platforms as primary medium for societal discourse is increasingly raising digital identity management challenges like information privacy preservation and maintenance of user reputation. This study explored the key factors that influence how users engage on social media platforms and their information disclosure behaviors through the lenses of information privacy and self-determination theories. The results provided interesting revelations that contribute to existing understanding on digital identity management on social media, and factors that influence social media platform design. For instance, we identified a disparity between information privacy concerns and actual privacy practices on social media. For instance, users who claim non-disclosure of sensitive personal information on social media, usually do so using pseudonyms, whereas attention- seeking users are less information privacy sensitive on social media.

Theoretically, this study enhances existing understanding of how users engage on social media. The study has also shown that competence and user exposure positively influence personal information disclosure behavior. We, therefore, argue that users' ability to establish the legitimacy of parties to social media interactions are fundamental requirements in how individuals engage on social media.

The study has also deepened existing understanding of the information privacy calculus and their implications on information disclosure behaviors on social media by highlighting that competent users are likely to be selective in their use of the privacy settings on social media platforms. Thus, social media platform developers must improve the ease of the privacy settings to ensure a positive information disclosure behavior by social media users.

We note the validity issues in the use of two hundred and fifty (250) respondents in the quantitative strand of the study. However, adoption of mixed methods research design particularly addresses such limitations since inferences from the eight (8) focus group discussions comprising eighty-six (86) participants is intended to bridge the validation gap [ 93, 94]. It is our expectation that future studies using extensive collection of data will be carried out to validate the findings from this study.

Future research should explore the relationships between the identified factors and the extent of their impact on personal information disclosure behavior of users using quantitative research techniques. Obviously, since most of the factors are latent behavioral characteristics, SEM techniques could be employed to identify the causal and dynamic relationship between the variables. Additionally, future studies should seek to conduct longitudinal studies to provide results that are more robust and yield more efficient and consistent estimates to give evidence to inform policy on digital identity management and education. This is particularly important in light of the fact that in recent years Africa has seen the world's highest Internet penetration growth rates. This means that we should expect social media to play an increasingly prominent role in the socioeconomic, political, cultural and security on the continent. Accordingly, any study that helps to shed light on these issues is in the right direction.

Author Contributions

Conceptualization, J.K.A.; Background and Related Work, J.K.A., S.A., I.K.M., P.E.T., S.O.-A.; Conceptual Framework, J.K.A., S.A., I.K.M., P.E.T.; Methods, J.K.A., S.A., I.K.M., P.E.T., S.O.-A.; Discussion of Results, J.K.A., S.A., I.K.M., P.E.T., S.O.-A.; Conclusions, J.K.A., S.A.; Writing-Original Draft Preparation, J.K.A., S.A.; Writing-Review and Editing, J.K.A., S.A., I.K.M., P.E.T., S.O.-A. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

Funding

The work was not funded by any organization.

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

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Adjei JK, Adams S, Mensah IK, Tobbin PE, Odei-Appiah S. Digital Identity Management on Social Media: Exploring the Factors That Influence Personal Information Disclosure on Social Media. Sustainability. 2020; 12(23):9994. https://doi.org/10.3390/su12239994

Chicago/Turabian Style

Adjei, Joseph Kwame, Samuel Adams, Isaac Kofi Mensah, Peter Ebo Tobbin, and Solomon Odei-Appiah. 2020. "Digital Identity Management on Social Media: Exploring the Factors That Influence Personal Information Disclosure on Social Media" Sustainability 12, no. 23: 9994. https://doi.org/10.3390/su12239994

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Digital Identity Management on Social Media: Exploring the Factors That Influence Personal Information Disclosure on Social Media

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A number of social media platforms have emerged as dominant medium for societal discourse, enabling significant user involvement in creation and shaping of social media contents. However, the phenomenon raises the challenge of digital identity management on such platforms in order to maintain reputations and ensure information privacy preservation.

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drowning in entertainment: the age of distraction

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drowning in entertainment: the age of distraction