How Young People Shape and Are Shaped by Social Media
Teens and young adults have complex and nuanced relationships with social media, Associate Professor of the Practice in Education Studies Rachel Besharat Mann found in a recent study. While their social feeds are shaped by algorithms, young people actively learn to shape the algorithms in return, strategically engaging with and resisting forms of targeting. Social media may also be a site of mutual influence that can encourage civic engagement, even if that engagement is often superficial, her research indicated.
At a time when concerns about social media’s impact on young people are high, Besharat Mann embarked on a study to examine how teens and young adults actually use social media to seek news and political information, as well as to inform their developing identities.
“We know something is happening to young people on social media—whether it affects their mental health or not—but it is clearly shaping how they communicate with one another and how they engage with information,” she said. While Besharat Mann has already studied how young people seek information online, she wanted to go deeper to explore the processes behind social media information consumption and how young people position themselves in these spaces.
To explore those pressing questions, Besharat Mann employed a variety of research methods. In addition to asking the study participants—aged 14 to 21—to fill out surveys about their social media usage, she had them engage in “think-alouds.” The participants opened their social media apps and narrated what they were seeing and doing on the platforms for several minutes. In another think-aloud experiment, the researchers asked participants to seek information about a specific topic. These think-alouds were recorded, transcribed, and analyzed for themes to illuminate the processes of information consumption and how young people saw themselves as information consumers.
The research team also used debriefs and post-interview discussions immediately following the think-alouds. They posed questions about what platforms participants liked, concerns they had about social media, and what they were learning in school about social media.
Besharat Mann found that young people are not passive recipients of information on social media. Rather, they are both aware of the algorithm and responding to it. They engaged in what researchers call “critical ignoring” to avoid content they didn’t want to see. “It was two-pronged because, yes, the algorithm is targeting them for certain things, but they're targeting the algorithm in response," she said. Besharat Mann calls this process “reciprocal algorithmic manipulation.”
The teens and young adults also did their own research by using searches to find out more about topics they first learned about on social. “Their information-seeking patterns are being shaped by the platforms,” Besharat Mann said.
Another key finding is that social media motivated young people to engage with political causes, on and offline. However, they admitted that their engagement was often limited to activities such as sharing images or liking posts. “Sometimes they felt like the way social media makes people act was inauthentic and performative, though they emphasized being more informed overall,” said Besharat Mann.
Social Media and Literacy
The study results point to the need to educate young people, starting in middle school, about social media use beyond warnings about safety and privacy. In an English class, for example, students could be tasked to search online for what’s written about a book they’re reading or to seek information about current events for a social studies class. “This sort of literacy education needs to be more embedded in schools to not only prepare students for the future, but to help them effectively navigate the digital spaces they participate in every day,” said Besharat Mann.
Now that Besharat Mann has a deeper understanding of how young people are engaging with social media, next steps in her research include exploring how online and offline civil discourse is conceptualized in educational standards and in classrooms. This work seeks to understand how education can support civil discourse components to help young people learn to express their views efficiently, actively listen to others, and engage in discussion for compromise and community.
The full study is published in Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy.
