Teen Talk: The Good, the Bad, and the Neutral of Adolescent Social Media Use
Abdulmalik Alluhidan, Mamtaj Akter, Ashwaq Alsoubai, Jinkyung Park,, Pamela Wisniewski

TL;DR
This study analyzes adolescent social media discussions to reveal both positive and negative experiences, highlighting platform-specific differences and advocating for design-based solutions to enhance youth well-being.
Contribution
It provides a thematic analysis of teens' social media experiences across platforms, emphasizing the coexistence of benefits and drawbacks and proposing design-oriented interventions.
Findings
Negative experiences are most frequently shared (58%)
Teens seek romantic relationships on Snapchat and self-promote on YouTube
Instagram is linked to body shaming, Facebook to privacy concerns
Abstract
The debate on whether social media has a net positive or negative effect on youth is ongoing. Therefore, we conducted a thematic analysis on 2,061 posts made by 1,038 adolescents aged 15-17 on an online peer-support platform to investigate the ways in which these teens discussed popular social media platforms in their posts and to identify differences in their experiences across platforms. Our findings revealed four main emergent themes for the ways in which social media was discussed: 1) Sharing negative experiences or outcomes of social media use (58%, n = 1,095), 2) Attempts to connect with others (45%, n = 922), 3) Highlighting the positive side of social media use (20%, n = 409), and 4) Seeking information (20%, n = 491). Overall, while sharing about negative experiences was more prominent, teens also discussed balanced perspectives of connection-seeking, positive experiences, and…
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