The next speaker in this session at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno is Ruth Wendt, who highlights the many uses that social media can be put to, and the many risks which critics have identified: opportunities for networking, social connection, peer support, information retrieval, etc. are juxtaposed with concerns about cyberbullying, child exploitation, misinformation, etc.
Studies to date have found only very weak association between time spent on social media and wellbeing, but studies on minors remain rare; social media bans in Australia and elsewhere are an unfortunate natural experiment which will shine further light on this. There are some indications that social media use might have an impact on personal wellbeing only during certain life phases (the onset of puberty, transition into adulthood), and that young people with pre-existing mental health challenges are much more affected than others. There may also be gender-specific effects, with significant concerns especially about gender-diverse adolescents.
This means that blanket bans are problematic: a better alternative would be to improve digital literacy in young users. Digital literacy is of course required for young people as they transition into adulthood, and may also help reduce potential harm from using digital technologies. There are some indications that better digital literacy can improve personal wellbeing, but more research still needs to be done on this, and longitudinally.
Better and more standardised assessment instruments must also still be developed for such studies, and much of the research lacks a shared framework; recent studies variously speak of news literacy, information literacy, algorithmic literacy, social media literacy, and AI literacy, for instance. This points to considerable fragmentation in the current scholarship.
Two concepts might be especially relevant in our discussion of social media bans, in fact: algorithmic literacy is the first of these, since engaging with social media also means engaging with algorithms. Such literacy means being aware of the use of algorithms in such platforms, knowing how algorithms work, being able to critically evaluate algorithmic decision-making, and having the skills to cope with algorithmically recommended content. Greater such literacy appears to influence their social media usage practices, increasing indifferent and reducing interactive behaviours, but also reducing preventive and critical behaviours. Age, gender, and formal education do not appear to play a role in this.
The second concept here is social media literacy: skills to use social media for integration, engage with others, and consider the social consequences of such engagement. Participatory-moral abilities, motivation, and behaviour are especially interesting here: greater literacy here leads to stronger intentions to report online hate, stronger intentions to support victims of online hate, and more general participatory-moral behaviour. This appears to be the case across various European countries.
What this points us to is a need for more evidence-based and more nuanced discussions of adolescents’ social media use, rather than blanket bans; digital literacy needs to be promoted broadly, and focus on transferable skills, and it should build on and strengthen the meaningful digital literacy skills many adolescents have already acquired.
