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For teenagers, social media can help them find hobbies to do or different jobs they want to do in the future. For example, social media can show the youth the process of either being an influencer, model, musician, mechanic, etc.

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Social media platforms benefits for young people - Internet Matters. How to help kids develop skills and build a good digital footprint using social media.

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Social Media for the youth has the power to get other teenagers to other teenagers around the world. In apps like Instagram, Tiktok and Twitter can show teenagers the same interest or dream careers they have as other teenagers, so they can push that agenda and help do their dreams together. For example if an teenager finds another teenager that wants to become a streamer, they can both stream together once in a while and can also give each other tips to help with streaming.

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One of the tasks of this report is to summarize the effect of social media on adolescents and children, including its influence on their education, social development, and family dynamics. Full understanding of these effects involves consideration not only of the harms of social media (the topic of much of the existing research presented in the next chapter), but to explore its potential benefits.

The perception that social media is a threat may be partially attributed to researchers' interest in exploring harms. When faced with evidence of a deterioration in young people's mental health the logical reaction is to first consider the potentially harmful role of new technology. There is also a question of publication bias. The tendency for statistically significant or flashy results to be published and null results to be filed away is a problem across disciplines, although it may be particularly acute in social science ( Franco et al., 2014; Peplow, 2014). When published literature carries a bias, any subsequent meta-analysis or review will carry that bias forward into overstated conclusions ( Meier and Reinecke, 2020; Olsson and Sundell, 2023). For this reason, tests for publication bias are increasingly common in meta-analyses ( Peters et al., 2006; van Enst et al., 2014).

What is more, the meta-analyses presented in Appendix C report small effects and weak associations, drawn mainly from cross-sectional studies establishing associations between social media use and adolescent well-being. Only one of the meta-analyses reviewed in Appendix C, for example, drew on exclusively experimental data ( McComb et al., 2023). There is ample room for positive and negative experiences within or between users to be obscured in analyses. It is possible that the small associations reported may be influenced by a balance of good and bad experiences. That the use of social media, like many things in life, may be a constantly shifting calculus of the risky, the beneficial, and the mundane.

The balance between the social value and entertainment young people find online can be compared to other socially uniting, entertaining pastimes. It is reasonable to point out that we seldom pathologize young people who enjoy watching sports. Yet a societal shift wherein all young people were suddenly watching sports all the time, late night, to the neglect of other activities, would give us pause. The committee recognizes that social media is associated with harm for some young people, though whether or not it is the cause of such harm is harder to say. If the aggregate experience of social media were harmful to neutral, then different restrictive actions would be justified in the interest of protecting the most vulnerable. Yet the reality is more complicated. This chapter discusses the beneficial potential of social media with some emphasis on the processes through which benefits may accrue.

WHY ADOLESCENTS USE SOCIAL MEDIA

As the previous chapter indicated, social media sites include a variety of affordances, many of which are powered by algorithms that operate behind the scenes. These very design elements of social media platforms intersect with the adolescent developmental experience in ways that influence their social media use. Academic researchers and public discussion have directed considerable attention to understanding these intersections, contributing to a narrative that social media harms people by undermining relationships, cultivating superficiality, increasing anxiety and depression, and inhibiting the ability to concentrate and sustain attention.

One nationally representative, longitudinal study that followed children ages 10 to 13 over 8 years, found that time spent on social media was not associated with depression or anxiety ( Coyne et al., 2020). Subgroup analyses led the researchers to conclude that "far more adolescents have positive or neutral experience on [social media] than negative," allowing that the most benefit may accrue to young people with chaotic home lives and those who feel marginalized, groups often at increased risk for mental health problems ( Coyne, 2023, p. 18). Such results suggest that social media may benefit some groups of young people.

Adolescent self-reports paint a similar picture. Figure 3-1 shows results of a recent Pew Research survey showing that over 90 percent of a nationally representative sample of teens aged 13 to 17 years find social media to have a positive or neutral effect on them ( Anderson et al., 2022), though more than one-third felt the amount of time they spent using social media was too much ( Vogels et al., 2022). A modest majority (54 percent) thought it would be very hard or somewhat hard to give up social media ( Anderson et al., 2022).

Teenagers, like adults, use social media to accomplish goals and satisfy needs. Recognizing social media as a tool helps understand the real or perceived benefits and the reasons why adolescents use the platform ( Lee et al., 2023). When asked about the benefits of using social media, adolescents list connections and socializing, accessing information and learning, along with entertainment and fun, as some of the reasons for using social media (see Figure 3-1).

Social connection is important in early life as it has implications for the development of secure relationships and even good physical health later in life ( Caspi et al., 2006; Danese et al., 2009; Holt-Lunstad, 2022; Yang et al., 2016). Social media platforms offer a means of social connection. By using these platforms, adolescents can easily connect with friends, classmates, and acquaintances, allowing them to maintain relationships, expand their social networks, and stay connected even when physically apart. It is not clear the extent to which social media use fosters real social connection, however. A meta-analysis of cross-sectional data found weak but positive associations between social media use and loneliness ( Zhang et al., 2022). This association may differ across ages. A survey exploring the relationship between social media use and loneliness in four countries found that, during the COVID-19 pandemic, frequent social media use was associated with greater levels of loneliness among young adults, though this correlation could be related to a circular relationship with social media use and other isolating mental health problems ( Bonsaksen et al., 2021). Further, social interactions are not always positive and doing so online is no exception ( Brooks and Dunkel Schetter, 2011; Holt-Lunstad and Uchino, 2019).

Social media can also provide a space for self-expression. Teens can express their identities, share their thoughts, and showcase their creativity through posts, photos, videos, and stories. This enables them to shape their online personas and receive validation and feedback from others-feedback that can be kind or hurtful. Additionally, social media can be used as a means to fulfill a need for belonging. Adolescents often seek acceptance and validation from their peers, and social media platforms offer communities where they can find like-minded individuals who share similar interests, values, or experiences. Furthermore, social media is a source of entertainment for adolescents that can be used to share funny videos, memes, music tailored to their interests, and more. Adolescents can find news, educational content, and discussions on various topics of interest on social media, thereby staying up to date on current events and global issues.

Understanding why youth use social media can help us understand how to tap into mechanisms to maximize their potential benefits. These reasons include learning, entertainment, relaxation, connection, stress relief, and a normal adolescent tendency to seek out varied and novel experiences ( Anderson et al., 2022; Hancock et al., 2022). Social media can provide a window to cultural experiences and information and, most obviously, a venue to socialize. Social media can foster positive emotions, as would happen for a young person using the platforms to connect with grandparents who live far away; it can also be used to avoid negative feelings, as might happen when someone watches a funny video or an online music lesson to take their mind off a bad day at school ( Cauberghe et al., 2021). At the center of these experiences are the use of coping strategies, some healthier than others. Although avoidance and escape are not always undesirable, the healthier strategies (e.g., seeking social support) may account for some people having a more positive experience on the platforms than others.

Social Capital and Social Connectedness

One of the most obvious potential benefits of social media is its power to connect friends and family. Adolescents report communication with family and friends as the most common and important functions of using social media ( Allen et al., 2014). Indeed, adolescents who take a positive view of social media attribute this firstly to the social connectedness and interactions the platforms allow ( Anderson et al., 2022). Qualitative research among young adults suggested that online interactions offer a controllable and accessible way to maintain relationships, especially valuable for maintaining ties to friends and family who live far away ( Scott et al., 2022). Some researchers have suggested that the social media affordances for direct, active exchanges with other users, so-called active use, allow for more positive effects on well-being than what is described as passive use, meaning scrolling or consuming the information without contributing, though such patterns may depend on the viewer's mindset ( Beyens et al., 2020). (That is, passive scrolling through a friend's photos could also bring someone happiness, depending on the person and their attitude toward what they are viewing.) More recent work has questioned the validity of the active use-passive use dichotomy, however ( Valkenburg et al., 2021). Use of social media in real life is invariably a mix of active and passive features that are difficult to disentangle experimentally or conceptually ( Valkenburg et al., 2021).

Maintaining social connections is associated with better well-being ( Jordan, 2023). Social media may contribute by building social capital, the tangible and intangible resources available to people through their social networks. Research among undergraduates has found that high levels of interaction on Facebook are associated with higher levels of bridging relationships between people who are not close friends, who can share new perspectives and information ( Ellison et al., 2014). A cross-sectional study among undergraduates found that people who use social media to connect with a diverse friend group also tend to have higher social self-efficacy (a perceived capability to navigate social situations and make friends), though it is not clear if social media builds this self-efficacy or if more confident people simply have a larger online friend group ( Kim et al., 2020). More recent pooled analyses have found that social networking can benefit its users through strengthening weak ties or transitioning an acquaintance into a friend ( Ahmad et al., 2023; Liu et al., 2016).

Combating Isolation

Social media can be valuable to adolescents who otherwise may feel excluded or lack offline support, including patients with rare diseases or disabilities, and those who struggle with obesity or mental illness, or come from marginalized groups such as LGBTQ+ young people ( Chassiakos et al., 2016). By offering a means to connect with people in the same position, social media can reduce stigma and be a venue for sharing coping strategies.

Social media can allow neurodiverse teens, for example, a way to connect socially with others that is manageable for them, thereby reducing feelings of loneliness ( Sallafranque-St-Louis and Normand, 2017). Qualitative research among adolescents with autism spectrum disorder indicates that the removal of body language cues that can be difficult for people with autism to interpret make social media an enjoyable venue for them ( Jedrzejewska and Dewey, 2022).

While the use of internet technology to ease loneliness has had mixed success more broadly ( Bonsaksen et al., 2021; Gheorghe and Stănculescu, 2021), it can help ease loneliness in certain circumstances. In social media, LGBTQ+ adolescents living in rural areas sometimes find support that they may not have in their offline world ( Escobar-Viera et al., 2022). LGBTQ+ youth also report benefits from connecting with other queer youth online and establishing support systems ( Berger et al., 2022; Han et al., 2019; Selkie et al., 2020). A similar pattern may be at work among young people in foster care, for whom social media and gaming are a welcome tool to make and maintain relationships in the face of frequent disrupting changes to their living space ( Gustavsson and MacEachron, 2015; Sage and Jackson, 2022).

Social media can help adolescents cope with grief and bereavement offering the opportunity to connect with people who have experienced a similar loss ( Sofka, 2017). The same is true for young people navigating isolating illnesses. Social media groups for various health conditions including cancer, diabetes, and rare diseases provide a way for patients to come together and support each other ( Chou and Moskowitz, 2016; Daniels et al., 2021; Househ et al., 2014; Malik et al., 2019). For people suffering from serious mental illness, the support of peers online is especially valuable, especially peers who can relate to the challenges of coping with mental health problems ( Naslund et al., 2016).

Much of the concern about the harms of social media revolve around its capacity for displacement, including the displacement of in-person socializing ( Twenge, 2020). Yet survey data suggest that this may vary by socioeconomic status. Teens from lower-income groups are less likely to interact with friends in their homes or outside of school and tend to put strong value on the friendships they make online, through gaming for example, even though these friends are not necessarily people whom they know offline ( Lenhart et al., 2015).

Moreover, socializing in person is not always possible. Physical isolation is a source of loneliness that social media can counter. During the peak physical distancing requirements of the COVID-19 pandemic, social media became the only venue many young people had to connect with their friends ( Kurz and Jahng, 2022). Even as pandemic-era distancing requirements ease, infrequent in-person time with friends is a fact of life for many adolescents. Driving and car ownership are relatively more expensive to young people today than they were in past generations, and most of the United States is poorly served by public transit, limiting young people's mobility and ability to socialize in person with people who are not close neighbors ( Kurz and Jahng, 2022).

Learning

Qualitative research indicates that adolescents value social media for its ability to expose them to the world and support their education ( Shankleman et al., 2021). A 15-country cross-sectional survey of more than 100,000 15-year-olds found that, in western countries, social media use predicts a greater ability for reading and navigating information online ( Chen et al., 2021). Social media can facilitate processes that have always been part of schooling such as studying together and sharing homework strategies ( Hadjipanayis et al., 2019). Other processes are relatively new and more unique to teens.

The concept of a media ecology, referring to both the technology that facilitates media access and its influence on human culture, ideas, and politics, is important to understanding why learning on social media is important for adolescents ( Milberry, 2012). The separation of formal and informal learning is not always clear in the new media ecology. Survey research among middle school students has found social media forums to be useful in collaboration on science and engineering projects, which may be part of an iterative, collaborative learning process ( Won et al., 2015). A mixed methods study of 12 to 14 year olds in Spain found that the informal learning characteristic of social media empowers young people and increases self-motivation for learning ( Gil Quintana and Osuna-Acedo, 2020).

An intense engagement with new media in the service of acquiring more expertise about a niche interest, sometimes described as geeking out, is an important dimension of learning for young people ( Ito et al., 2010). The types of learning often characterized as geeking out tend toward parallel exploration of a topic with friends and mediated by technology, with knowledge-building becoming difficult to separate from broader youth culture ( Ito et al., 2010).

Self-Expression and Independence

Forming a coherent sense of self and identity are core tasks of adolescent development. In the second decade of life, adolescents define themselves and change their relationship with their parents and other adults. Social media can aid the task, affording young people a place to explore their identity and shape their sense of self ( Spies Shapiro and Margolin, 2014).

Teens often report using social media to share information about oneself, one's environment, and one's social life and connections, with part of this experience involving feedback on this presentation from others ( Márquez et al., 2022; Yau and Reich, 2019). A relatively long-standing body of research indicates that this self-presentation and exploring of identity is an important part of adolescence that social media can support ( Moreno and Uhls, 2019; Subrahmanyam and Šmahel, 2011; Valkenburg et al., 2005). Qualitative research finds that many young people, especially cisgender girls, are meticulous in selecting which platform or account to post to, editing pictures, monitoring comments and likes, and removing posts when not viewed favorably by peers ( Bell, 2019; Yau and Reich, 2019). A similarly developmentally appropriate interest in self-presentation is part of avatar personalization and one that gay, lesbian, and transgender teens may put more emphasis on ( Morgan et al., 2020).

Empowerment and Civic Engagement

The same capacity for mass dissemination of information that makes the internet useful for education also influences young people's point of view. A 2018 Pew survey found that roughly two-thirds of teens aged 13 to 18 used social media to learn about different points of view or show their support for causes ( Anderson and Jiang, 2018). At the same time, only a minority of youth (<10 percent) in both the Pew 2018 and 2022 samples reported using social media to post about politics ( Anderson and Jiang, 2018; Anderson et al., 2022).

In qualitative studies, youth report being more aware of social and political events due to social media ( Common Sense Media, 2019). Research among 11- to 15-year-old participants in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study found that 30 percent of respondents used social media to engage with the Black Lives Matter movement ( Baskin-Sommers et al., 2021).

Civic involvement and social cohesion can be meaningful ends related to social media use, valuable both to adolescents and to society. That said, increased political involvement is not always positive. Social media has been cited as a source of political polarization, rife with partisanship and incivility, though such climates vary among different platforms ( Ferguson, 2021; Oden and Porter, 2023). It is difficult to say if a heightened hostility to opposing political views is a function of social media use or if social media is simply reflecting a broader cultural change. Some scholars have proposed that platforms built around offline friendship may have a mix of affordances that increase polarization, while groups built around shared interests may work counter to it ( Literat and Kligler-Vilenchik, 2021). Political polarization and the normalization of fringe viewpoints, like many of the topics reviewed in this chapter, can be amorphous and hard to measure. Similar problems abound in measuring the direct health effects of social media use, as the next chapter will discuss.

REFERENCES

Aragon C, Davis K. Writers in the secret garden: Fanfiction, youth, and new forms of mentoring. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; 2019.

Black RW. Adolescents and online fan fiction. New York: Peter Lang; 2008.

Bowins B. Chapter 4 - social connectedness. In: Bowins B, editor. States and processes for mental health. Academic Press; 2021. pp. 41-48.

Evans S, Davis K, Evans A, Campbell JA, Randall DP, Yin K, Aragon C. Paper presented at the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing. Portland, Oregon: 2017. More than peer production: Fanfiction communities as sites of distributed mentoring.

Froelich N, Liu A, Shang R, Xiao Z, Neils T, Frens J, Aragon C. Poster presented at 23rd HCI International Conference, HCII 2021, virtual event. 2021. Reciprocity in reviewing on fanfiction.net.

Garg P, Pahuja DS. Chapter 8 in Managing Social Media Practices in the Digital Economy. 2020. Social media: Concept, role, categories, trends, social media and AI, impact on youth, careers, recommendations; pp. 172-192.

Gheorghe P, Stănculescu E. Paper presented at the 32nd International Congress of Psychology. Prague, Czech Republic: 2021. Loneliness and social media usage: A meta-analysis.

Hancock JT, Liu SX, Luo M, Mieczkowski H. Social media and psychological well-being. In: Matz SC, editor. Psychology of Technology: Social Science Research in the Age of Big Data. American Psychological Association; 2022. pp. 195-238.

Ito M, Martin C, Rafalow M, Tekinbaş KS, Wortman A, Pfister RC. Online affinity networks as contexts for connected learning. In: Renninger KA, Hidi SE, editors. The Cambridge Handbook of Motivation and Learning, Cambridge Handbooks in Psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 2019. pp. 291-311.

Shang R, Xiao Z, Frens J, Aragon C. Paper presented at the 2021 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, Virtual Event. 2021. Giving and receiving: Reciprocal review exchange in online fanfiction communities.

Sofka C. Grief, adolescents, and social media. In: Arnold C, editor. Understanding Child and Adolescent Grief. Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group; 2017. pp. 163-178.

Subrahmanyam K, Šmahel D. Digital Youth: The Role of Media in Development. New York, NY: Springer New York; 2011. Adolescents' digital worlds: An introduction; pp. 1-25.

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One of the tasks of this report is to summarize the effect of social media on adolescents and children, including its influence on their education, social development, and family dynamics. Full understanding of these effects involves consideration not only of the harms of social media (the topic of much of the existing research presented in the next chapter), but to explore its potential benefits.

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Social media can give teenagers free resources and content for different education. People on social media will give tutorials and free courses to use social media as a way to give free education to teenagers to learn.

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Impact of Social Media: Advantages and Disadvantages

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Discover the impact of social media, its advantages, and disadvantages. Learn how social platforms shape communication, business, and daily life.