The next speaker in this session at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno is the great Anja Bechmann, who adds some empirical data on how younger users are actually engaging with social media platforms. The focus here is on Danish users aged 18-35, and on YouTube, and on users with ‘deviant’ personality profiles including extroversion and neuroticism.
This study worked with some 1,000 Danish participants who donated log files of YouTube use and engaged in a 25-minute survey about their usage practices; this enabled the project to examine, for instance, the time spent on the platform at various times in the day, which is often seen by advocates of social media bans as problematic in itself. This enables the exploration of correlations between personality and other demographic traits and YouTube viewing patterns.
Age, number of subscriptions, and search practices all affect the watching of short videos during day and night; subscriptions also strongly affect the watching of long-form videos at day and night; people living alone also watch more long-form videos, especially at night.
Young users spend more time on shorts, then, and more on long videos during the day. But there is no single heavy YouTube user profile; age, gender, and living alone all separately and together affect usage practices. Navigation of YouTube emerges as a more important factor, though: searching YouTube and subscribing to channels have a significant impact.
But is YouTube use at all a significant indicator of systemic risks to user wellbeing and overall societal patterns? Might other patterns – self-reported wellbeing, trust in societal institutions, political ideology and efficacy, experience of mis- and disinformation – also play a role here? These are all aspects that current public debate is concerned about.
From this, it emerges that demographics are the major predictor: personal attitudes and social media practices are relatively unimportant. Social status, educational levels, age and gender, and personal psychology, are the most important factors here, rather than any issues related to YouTube or social media usage practices alone. This means that blanket bans of demographic groups from social media platforms address the wrong problems.
