Moving Beyond Regulation & Restriction: A Critical Youth Perspective on Teen Social Media Governance

Social media is deeply ingrained into daily life for youth and holds both promise and peril to social, emotional, and mental well-being. Although social media can be an empowering space for young people to critically analyze sociopolitical issues and take collective action against injustice (Quiles-Kwock et al., 2024), it can also expose youth to bullying, harassment, and discriminatory content (Tanksley & Hunter, 2024). Social media may be a particularly powerful political tool for marginalized youth who are disenfranchised from other political opportunity structures afforded to their peers (Mathews, 2023). To address the perils of social media, there has been an increase in social media governance policy and programming within social media companies and in state-level policy. Policy has focused on censoring content, parental control, privacy protections, screen time limits, and reporting mechanisms. While these social media policies are aimed at mitigating digital harm, they may also restrict youth expression and sociopolitical participation. The Critical Youth Perspective approaches young peoples’ social worlds as a starting point for analysis, emphasizing diversity of experience across race, ethnicity, gender, class, community, and place. CYP attends to issues of power and oppression and how they affect the lives and well-being of youth. The CYP may help us critically reflect on how to minimize digital harm in ways that support youth autonomy, empowerment, and public participation. The CYP approach emphasizes five factors that influence youth development: systemic inequalities, critical consciousness, participation, collective action, and construction of counter-narratives (Lavie-Ajayi & Krumer-Nevo, 2013; Gonzalez et al.., 2020; Davies, 2005; Diemer & Hsieh, 2008). The guiding research question is: How are the principles of CYP currently reflected in social media governance? We conducted a media and document analysis of social media policy and programming, applying a critical youth perspective. We reviewed platform-level policies from TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, SnapChat, and X/Twitter. We also reviewed both proposed and adopted state-level social media-related policies and digital wellness interventions aimed at youth (n=352 policies). We found that social media policies lack proper consideration for how factors such as race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability shape youth development. We also explore how critical consciousness development can be used as a tool to fight misinformation and address concerns about youth surveillance and decreased privacy. We found some examples of youth-adult partnerships to co-design solutions that may minimize the risk of digital addiction or overuse without overrelying on parent surveillance. Finally, we identified ways social media can be used to encourage public participation while limiting risk to privacy and supporting youth in exploring/expressing counter-narratives in a way that limits harm to one’s sense of self. These findings can be used to advocate for racial and social justice and empowerment for youth in social media governance, inform social media company policy/design/programming, and improve critical digital literacy curricula.