The Paradoxes of Young People’s Social Media Uses: What Does the Actual Evidence Say?

The second day at the AANZCA 2024 conference starts with a keynote by Ysabel Gerrard, whose focus is on youth and social media – her new book The Kids Are Online is coming out in March 2025. Her research has involved studies of mental health cultures, anonymous apps, naming cultures, digital photo editing, and tech nostalgia, and the book makes a strong case for moving beyond binary approaches to social media as either good or bad, helpful or harmful, positive or negative, and for understanding social media as both at the same time, depending on the context. This also means that the challenge of youth social media use are not solvable with simple or simplistic solutions, whatever our politicians might pretend.

Yes, youth social media uses can be risky, and this can result in harm – but this comes with the territory. Young people negotiate their identities across platforms in highly paradoxical ways: sometimes technology use can result in polar opposite experiences that exist simultaneously within the same context, and this can be highly productive. Engaging in like-minded stigmatised communities can make young people them feel less alone, for example, but also exposes them to problematic content; it can be both exciting and harmful.

Working with young people to understand their naming practices across social media platforms – their use of real names or pseudonyms –, Ysabel found that young people (boys in the UK aged 13-14, in this case) had a strong desire to use pseudonymous nicknames in order to enhance their personal and social safety and feel safer; however, opportunities for identity concealment are now shrinking, especially given the ubiquity of contemporary connectivity. Anonymity is stigmatised as a result of the (possibly mistaken) belief that anonymity encourages people to behave in more uncivil and harmful ways, and there are plenty of initiatives that seek to end online anonymity altogether, often in response to major incidents.

This move away from anonymity or at least pseudonymity actively reduces young people’s personal safety. It makes them targets for various forms of abuse, and paradoxically they also see the benefits of anonymity as they themselves are targeted by anonymous accounts: greater anonymity is therefore beneficial for young people when it enables them themselves to protect their identities, but also harmful for them when anonymous actors target them with impunity. Young people have a sophisticated understanding of this, and a range of coping strategies to address these challenges.

In addition to such personal safety challenges, there are also a range of social safety concerns: these relate for instance to protecting from embarrassing identity disclosures about the self. Here, too, online identity concealment enables self-exploration, especially in relation to things that young people fear their peers might mock or misunderstand – it is an important element of the teenage process of growing up.

All of this poses a central paradox: while adults are constantly concerned that what teens do online might come back to haunt them in later life, and therefore want to put strict limits on what teens are able to do online in the first place, this concern is also precisely the reason that being able to be online anonymously or pseudonymously is so absolutely critical for teens – online identity concealment is a crucial mechanism in the protection of self and others, and should not be stigmatised by adults. Additionally, of course, and equally paradoxically, such identity concealment is valuable to the teens themselves as a means of protection, but is also abused by others with more nefarious motives.

Overall, however, often it is only by doing something risky – or even downright harmful – on social media that pleasure and enjoyment can be achieved. We must attend to these paradoxes, and enable them to exist, rather than removing them by overly de-risking and securitising social media use by young people.