Our Youth’s Perspective 2026: The Real Benefits and Challenges of Social Media

• Transcript

  Ron Dahl Over the past two decades social media has emerged as an increasingly pervasive sphere of influence in society.

  Research tells us that engaging with digital technology including social media can bring benefits and challenges. The public narrative tends to focus mostly on the potential harms and challenges. Yet, there is also value in considering how social media can support positive connections during our adolescent years.

  While adolescents are often the focus of adult conversations about social media, they also have a great deal to contribute as active participants in these discussions. Understandably, they have questions.

  Yonathan How does growing up in a digital age change the way adolescents form and maintain friendships compared to previous generations?

  Jeevana What do you think is the difference between healthy and supportive digital usage, and harmful and isolating digital usage?

  Kevin Does social media have any benefit for adolescents’ brain?

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  Ron Dahl I’m Ron Dahl, founding director of the Center for the Developing Adolescent, and this is Adaptivity, where we explore the science of adolescence, untangling misconceptions about the years between childhood and adulthood.

  We explore new insights into the rapid cognitive, emotional, and social changes that are happening during these years. And how the developing adolescent brain is primed to promote healthy and adaptive learning.

  Social media provides fundamentally new ways for young people to explore, connect, to learn, and potentially, to contribute to the wider world—all crucial aspects of positive development in our adolescent years.

  This vast space of opportunity for human connection represents a potential source of benefits of this technology, especially for young people. Yet, our sensitivity to social feedback creates new vulnerabilities. The availability of supportive, positive, connections and experiences for youth in their offline worlds may play a crucial role–helping them to navigate social media in ways that contribute (rather than undermine) their development in positive ways. 

  This is the third episode of our annual three-part Adaptivity miniseries where we talk to members of our Youth Scientific Council, a group of high school and college students who work with the Center for the Developing Adolescent to help us inform and communicate the science.

  In this episode we hear from YSCA members Yonathan Kiflezghie, Jeevana Doddi, and Kevin Ramirez, who talk with professor Lucia Magis-Weinberg, who studies digital media use among adolescents at the InterACT Lab at the University of Washington.

  The YSCA members wanted to learn more about how digital technology impacts young people’s relationships, and what considerations ensure that social media can be a positive force in their lives.

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  Yonathan Kiflezghie Hi, my name is Yonathan Kiflezghie and I’m a senior at University High School Charter.

  Jeevana Doddi Hi, my name is Jeevana Doddi and I’m a junior at University high school charter.

  Kevin Ramirez Hello, my name is Kevin Ramirez and I am a sophomore at West Los Angeles College. Today we are discussing how technology influences adolescents, social and familial relationships. We’ll examine how the adolescent brain responds to these changes early on. We’ll explore whether these impacts are positive, negative, or somewhere in between. Many adolescents are growing up with technology in ways their parents never did, making these differences important to understand.

  Jeevana Doddi Recognizing these contrasts helps explain how family relationships develop over time. We’re interested in how today’s youth navigate relationships in a digital era. Understanding these influences can help us see how online interactions shape connections and overall well-being.

  Yonathan Kiflezghie So I’ve seen firsthand how technology affects my daily life. Technology in our schools, lives often reduce real conversations with students, avoiding discussions because of screens. However, after implementing Yonder pouches in our school lives, social interactions and classrooms improved. Yondr pouches are lockable cases that keep students’ phones stored away during the school day. Due to this, face to face collaborations on projects became stronger compared to working silently online, and these changes led us to explore how technology affects relationships.

  Jeevana Doddi To learn more about this topic, we’re joined by Lucia Magis-Weinberg, an assistant professor of psychology and associate director for research at the center for Digital Youth at the University of Washington. Thank you so much for joining us, Professor Magis-Weinberg.

  Lucia Magis-Weinberg Thank you so much for having me. Delighted to be part of the conversation.

  Jeevana Doddi First, can you give us an overview of what you study?

  Lucia Magis-Weinberg Certainly. So I direct the InterACT Lab, which stands for International Adolescent Connection through Technology Laboratory, where we study how social media and digital media have transformed many aspects of adolescent development, including their emotional and social development, and we also do a lot of work with schools to collect data on things that we’re interested in, but also to design interventions to promote healthier digital habits. And one thing that we’re investigating in my lab right now is the impact of what Jonathan was saying, these new phone restrictions that we’re seeing in different schools and how those impact academic performance, distraction, but also social interactions.

  Yonathan Kiflezghie Thank you so much for sharing a bit about yourself, Professor Magis-Weinberg. This is Yonathan again, and the first question I had for you is based on your research, how does growing up in a digital age change the way adolescents form and maintain friendships compared to previous generations?

  Lucia Magis-Weinberg Thank you for that question. That’s something that we’ve spent a lot of time thinking about in my lab. So one key feature of technology is that it allows us to be constantly connected and connected at a distance, which I think has a lot of positives. It allows us to maintain relationships with people who are not in our local environments. We can still be in touch with people from other cities, other countries, and that’s great. And we can also be in constant connection. 

  That has a lot of positives, but we also know from a lot of young people that it has become a big source of digital stress. I keep hearing from young people that they now feel the pressure to respond quickly to their friends. They feel the pressure to respond in the middle of the night. What is being a good friend has really changed, and I think the pressure is much bigger than in the past. 

  One other thing we study in the lab is how our conflicts now change. I think a big part of adolescence is learning how to relate to others, how to manage and regulate our hour interactions. But now, because our communications also are happening online, conflicts can, I think, spiral out of control very quickly. Right? 

  You might be having a discussion with a friend. There’s a misunderstanding because there isn’t that body language or voice to react from. You don’t have those social cues. So you might misunderstand what others are saying. 

  And at the same time, other people might be part of this conversation. Now our private conversations can become public. People can screenshot, things can go viral. People can start sharing these screenshots. So we now speak a lot about what people call “digital drama,” how small misunderstandings can quickly spiral out of control because of digital features of social media and other platforms.

  Yonathan Kiflezghie I have a follow up question. Do you think that online friendships are as emotionally supportive as in-person friendships? And do you think there are certain types of social media or different social medias that we use, like Instagram or Snapchat that strengthen or weaken social skills over time?

  Lucia Magis-Weinberg Thank you Jonathan. In our lab, we have been studying online-only friendships. So those friendships that we form with people we might never meet in person. It used to be the case that social media was used mostly with our friends from school or our friends in person, and we would talk to them on social media after school. But now, more and more, we know that maybe a third of young people have these online-only friends, people they’ve never met in person. We often meet them in gaming-related social media, maybe discord or other types of media like that. And we’ve actually studied that same question you just asked. 

  What we found is that when comparing in-person friendships with online-only friendships, in-person friendships have more of both, more of the good, but also more of the bad. So online-only friendships can sort of fill some needs. Not all of them. But I think especially in terms of finding shared interests, some people find that online-only friendships are more manageable. Maybe if you have some anxieties about talking to some people in person, you feel that you can sort of prepare better to have these online interactions. You can sort of anticipate what’s going to happen, you can prepare, you can sort of disconnect when you need to. 

  So in general, we find that online-only friendships can be especially a source of shared interests and a source of support, but not to the same extent that in-person friendships can be. But I do want to highlight again that in-person friendships also have more intensity in terms of conflict. We’re talking to other humans, so there’s going to be some fluctuation and some learning, and we’ll make mistakes. And sometimes our friends will make mistakes. That’s what we’re finding.

  Jeevana Doddi This is Jeevana. Thank you for your perspective on online digital use affecting friendships. I kind of wanted to ask a question more centered around familial relationships. So in terms of family relationships, how do you think that technology use can influence communication between parents and kids nowadays?

  Lucia Magis-Weinberg Thank you. One thing we’re finding in our research is that the expectations for more constant communication, even with parents, is changing compared to perhaps when I was growing up. For example, I would go to school and for eight hours I wouldn’t have the capacity to reach out to my parents unless, of course, there was an emergency and I would go through the school principal. 

  Today, these things have drastically changed. So especially in our phone restriction studies, we are finding that some of the resistance comes from the parents, who are also expecting to be in constant communication with their children and children as well. So yes, I think this constant connection has maybe changed the expectations that we need to be constantly connected with our parents, we see that maybe instead of reaching out to maybe friends or the teachers, adolescents are reaching out to their parents for emotional support or for help with even schoolwork while they’re at school. We now see that a lot of parents are also monitoring, for example, location or asking their children to share their location when they’re traveling. So that has changed a bit of the dynamics.

  I think a term that’s popular in our field is that of techno-ference. That was first coined when thinking about parents who are looking at their device while they’re interacting with their kids. And we know that just the presence of the device and the distraction that comes with that device can reduce the quality of interaction. So that’s something we are concerned about, where both parents and teens might feel that they’re being ignored because the other is distracted by their screens. And one thing that is, I think, a problem that a lot of families are dealing with is that managing technology has become one source, one very frequent source of conflict. And maybe it’s not big conflict, but it might be a source of constant discussion in the family where maybe adolescents might want to spend more time on their screens or on their phones. And parents like constantly trying to manage that. So those are ways in which interactions with parents have changed because of technology.

  Jeevana Doddi Thank you for that insight. I also wanted to ask, are there certain strategies that parents can use to kind of close that generational digital gap, instead of just restricting cell phones or restricting the usage of all these tech devices?

  Lucia Magis-Weinberg We talk about many, many strategies that we recommend families do. The first one is that I think parents should be also involved in their children’s online lives, like they are in their offline lives, right? Parents know who your in-person friends are, what activities you like. They take you to soccer practice or to drama club, right? Like parents are naturally involved in in-person activities and interactions. We would really recommend that parents are also involved in people’s online lives. For example, we really recommend families play together or watch media together, or do a quick tour of your child’s social media with consent, of course. 

  We also know that parents are an important source of helping adolescents regulate their use. So we recommend that families come up with a media plan or a sort of a family contract, where as a family, you decide what works for you. We definitely encourage families to have times and spaces without devices and screens, especially, for example, maybe dinners. We want to urge everyone to have, like, a very in-person family dinner, for example, where even parents are not allowed to be on their phones. We know that rules around technology use should be adapted as an adolescent grows older and becomes more mature. So definitely these rules need to be revisited often. We always want to keep a line of communication open with parents. 

  We know that when adolescents get concerned about maybe a problem they’ve had online, they don’t want to tell their parents about it because they’re afraid that the parents will take away their phones. That’s actually very counterproductive, right? Because parents are there to help manage some problems that might be happening in online spaces. So these are some of the recommendations that we have.

  Kevin Ramirez This is Kevin. Thank you so much for your response. While technology clearly affects how adolescents communicate with their families, it may also influence how they pay attention in everyday social settings. Does early exposure to digital elements like apps, texting, and social media affect adolescents’ attentional abilities and real interactions?

  Lucia Magis-Weinberg Very much. I think one of our biggest concerns with the way in which digital media is designed is that we know that these companies are designed to maximize our engagement. These are companies for which we oftentimes don’t pay to access with money. That means we are paying with something else. We are paying with our attention and with our time and with our personal data. So platforms and all the platforms that we used are designed to maximize engagement. So they’ll have pop up notifications, bright colors, things, right? Like many ways of attracting our attention that with time are building us this bad habit of being constantly, what we call in my research, online vigilance, right? We’re oftentimes checking our phones, going to it, feeling like it has vibrated, even if it hasn’t. And we know that that is really disruptive of our capacity to pay attention to what’s happening around us, whether it’s school or a class or something we’re reading or homework we’re doing or interactions with others. 

  Now we talk about this phenomena of digital media multitasking, right? Where now I think it’s very expected in a group of friends to be chatting with one another, but at the same time taking pictures of the group, but also maybe looking for a video and watching the video together. We know that task switching is something that it has a cost to the brain, so your brain needs to be paying attention to what your friend is saying and then to what the phone is doing. And every time you’re switching between one task and the other, you are losing sort of microseconds and you’re losing on both of the interactions. So definitely these constant interruptions are making it harder to focus in the classroom or academic context, but also in the context of our friends.

  Kevin Ramirez To follow up. Does it change how you handle long conversations or group activities? Could it impact learning or collaboration skills in school?

  Lucia Magis-Weinberg I think it has changed the pace of conversations. I think we’re much more used to, like, quick pace of interactions and conversations. There’s a recent study that found that young people are spending 1.5 hours in social media during school hours. If you imagine that the total school day is maybe seven hours, 1.5 hours is a lot. Out of those seven hours and it’s not used as academic, it’s use that’s on social media. So we definitely are concerned about what our social and digital media crowding out or displacing, because I definitely feel that there’s a lot of positives for social media, but in the right place and at the right time.

  Yonathan Kiflezghie Thank you so much for sharing about how early exposure to digital elements affect adolescents’ attention. The next question I have is about teens’ online and offline lives. Do you think that constant feedback online changes social perceptions in the brain, making teens more desperate for peer approval?

  Lucia Magis-Weinberg Yeah, so we need to remember that adolescence in general, even before social media existed, has always been a time of sensitivity to the social world. Adolescents’ brains and psychologies care deeply about peers, care deeply about the social environment. We care deeply about our status or how popular we are. 

  But what happens now is that the way social media and other platforms are designed is that it’s particularly rewarding social interactions, right? So we have design features such as number of likes, right? So now you have sort of a metric where you can see this person did this activity and they have 233 likes and this other person did this other thing and they have 120 likes. So yeah, I think design features of the environment are disrupting how we think about our levels of status and popularity. Of course, now you can see the networks, right? You can see who’s friends with whom, who is a close friend with another person, right? Like there’s all these design elements in the environment that are giving us all these social information for which our brains as adolescents are very primed for.

  Jeevana Doddi This is Jeevana. And our next question is that we know that technology can be used for active connection or passive doomscrolling, which is just obsessively scrolling through social media without really having an end for it. What do you think is the difference between healthy and supportive digital usage, and harmful and isolating digital usage? And how might that shape how adolescent relationships develop over time?

  Lucia Magis-Weinberg Thank you for your question. So one exercise I like to do when, when we do our workshops in school is that we take, for example, the 24 hours in a day. And that’s something I would encourage everyone who’s listening to do. So if you subtract from those 24 hours the time that you need to spend in school, which are typically 7 to 8 hours, the time that we need for sleep, we know how important sleep is for our mental health. Our capacity to regulate emotions and regulating emotions is very important for us to be good friends and to be able to respond to social stressors. 

  We need to do one hour of physical activity. We need to move our bodies for one hour. We need enough time to do our homework, maybe 1 hour to 2 hours. So if you start subtracting all of that in your day, and of course, you need to time in person with your family and with your friends, the reality is that we have, if you do that subtraction for your own day, likely you end up having maybe 2 hours of free time. 

  But then we contrast that with the fact. For example, Common Sense Media, I think, has estimated that adolescents, maybe in 2021, were using screens recreationally for more than maybe 8.5 hours. And whilst like the total amount of screen time shouldn’t be our biggest focus, we know that being on screens is crowding out very important things for our development, which are sleep, exercise, school like, time for school, time for in-person interactions, and just time downtime to relax.

  Beyond the total number of hours, we really want that time spent online to be quality time. And that requires, as you were saying, active use where you’re actually connecting with your friends or with your peers. I think one of the biggest benefits of social media is this capacity to connect. Whenever possible, we want that to be, like, synchronous at the same time. So maybe video chats, that would be the best option. Or maybe you’re engaged in a chat, but actively when the other person is responding at the same time instead of letting it be. Maybe doing an activity together if it’s online, maybe playing a game with your friends or watching a movie together. We want use to be as intentional as possible. Being very aware that platforms are designed to counter this intentionality. 

  But doomscrolling, I think, is a perfect example of how design features are amplifying maybe the negative aspects of social media experiences in response to the algorithm, right? Somehow you fed the algorithm and it knows that you’re going to like to doomscroll. So taking breaks, being reminded, am I using the social media, digital media, video games, videos with intention? And am I in charge or is the design and the platform or my phone in charge?

  Kevin Kiflezghie Thank you so much. So if passive doomscrolling can already affect teens’ mood, connection, and even brain patterns over time, it makes us wonder–social media can be used as an outlet for many teens. At what point does social media become a danger to an adolescent’s brain?

  Lucia Magis-Weinberg I think that’s a question we ask ourselves a lot, and it’s not a one-size-fits-all. It will really depend on the adolescent themselves. We need to take into account whether the adolescent already has some vulnerabilities. Maybe they have some mental health problems, or maybe they’re having sleeping issues so they’ll be more sensitive, more emotionally reactive. Or maybe this adolescent doesn’t have a lot of support at home. Or maybe this adolescent has a lot of family support that can help them, like weather any issues that they find. Right. So it’s going to be very dependent on the individual. It’s going to be very dependent on the context of this child, of the content that they’re consuming, right? 

  In social media, digital media, the digital world, you can find all types of content, great high-quality content, content that’s not age appropriate content, that’s very violent, content that has a lot of misinformation or that’s scary. So there’s a lot of considerations there. But of course, when we talk about brain development and more general development, we want to take everything into account.

  Kevin Kiflezghie To follow up, does social media have any benefit for adolescents’ brain?

  Lucia Magis-Weinberg Uh, we definitely think so. For example, right now we’re doing this like great chat and we’re doing it, uh, remotely. And we were able to coordinate our schedules and sit together and have these conversation, something that we wouldn’t have been able to do in the past. So I think for me, that’s one of the biggest benefits, to connect with other people who have shared interests at a distance. 

  We have seen countless examples of how young activists have gone to social media and have organized around topics that they care deeply about. They find followers, they organize movements. So I think that’s one of the biggest values of social media, which is amplifying voices that weren’t in the mainstream before. And in this case a podcast like this is a wonderful example.

  Yonathan Kiflezghie That was our last question, and I’d like to thank you for sharing your research and expertise with us today, Professor Magis-Weinberg.

  Lucia Magis-Weinberg Oh, thank you so much for having me. It’s been a pleasure.

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  Yonathan Kiflezghie I think that she made a lot of good points. Like, I think talking to people older than me, they say that we don’t need our screens because they obviously grew up in a generation where technology wasn’t around them. But I liked how she mentioned where it’s finding that balance of, you know, putting in sleep and subtracting that from 24 hours in school, homework, and time with your family. So is there any other points that we’d like to talk about?

  Jeevana Doddi For me, the takeaway of some of the strategies that Professor Magis-Weinberg suggested was the 24-hours strategy, where you kind of allocate hours for each kind of task in your life, like family time and schoolwork and just going to school. And then that kind of leaves you with a specific time frame and how much time you can actually spend on social media without having to regret it or feeling guilty of it, rather, after, like, designating time for it, you can feel more like, less guilty of it. And you’re like, I deserve this time. 

  Kevin Ramirez For me, a key takeaway would be the part where she mentioned in-real-life friendships and online friendships, where in-real-life friendships, it contains most of the good and the bad parts. And that’s something that I never really looked at. Where real-life friends do contain most of the good and bad parts.

  Jeevana Doddi I think when I was asking her about, you know, active and passive social media usage, she mentioned how apps and notifications are like super bright and colorful, kind of to attract people in, even if you’re doing something really important, like the moment you get a notification, you see like Instagram, for example, it’s like a really colorful icon and it kind of like pulls you in where you’re like, I have to click it and see what my friend sent me on Instagram. So that was something that was like I hadn’t considered before, like the visual aspects of the social media apps we’re using also could really affect our desire to be pulled into it.

  Yonathan Kiflezghie I think that quality screen time is really important, obviously. For example, during spring break, if you’re home, like, all day, there will be times that you’re stuck on your phone. But I’d say that, like, using it the right way is different from just doomscrolling on Instagram for a long time or on TikTok. So let’s say, for example, I’m watching YouTube videos to learn certain topics or to study for a test and I’m having to watch these YouTube videos. I think that’s completely different from me just sitting in my bed all day bed-rotting, just doomscrolling the whole day. 

  So I think that’s something to also keep in mind that, like, if most of your screen time is coming from that, then like, you shouldn’t let that stop you from going on your phone or going on your laptop because you’re still learning something no matter what. If you’re opening your screen time, it’s going to say like eight hours, but those eight hours might be just reading books on your laptop or even going on YouTube videos versus someone else’s eight hours being scrolling on TikTok. You’re not going to be perfect 24-7, and you might fall into that loop of maybe scrolling. And that happens because our brains are still growing right now, but it works hand-in-hand. You could train yourself to like work on that quality screen time, but then if you have a lot of screen time on your hands from doing other things, you shouldn’t be ashamed about that. I think that’s something that, like, we can all work on and, you know, maybe other people also struggle with that.

  Kevin Ramirez So a positive thing she mentioned is this meeting, for example, on how we’re creating this podcast that will reach to other people. And yeah, so that’s one thing I found positive.

  Yonathan Kiflezghie A positive thing that Professor Magis-Weinberg mentioned was like how social media at first used to connect with your friends, but now it’s kind of one of those things where if you meet someone on a video game, you can share your Instagram and then from there, you guys can stay in contact with each other. And it’s one of those easy relationships you can have with somebody. I’d say it’s like low-effort, high-reward, where, like, it doesn’t take that long to send a text message to somebody. But in return, you’re getting like this valuable connection with somebody. And you know, it takes you away from all the in-person relationships, too. Not saying that’s not important, but sometimes you do need to take a step away from other people because you see them every single day. But with these online relationships, it’s like someone you can go to whenever you want and one click away, they could respond.

  Jeevana Doddi I was surprised how she mentioned kind of activism as one of the positive aspects, I know, like, in our current political climate, that’s a really important part of social media. So, her mentioning that was really important, because it kind of made it seem like this is something we can definitely keep doing, and it’s sustainable for sure, because it’s actually making real-time change.

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  Jeevana Doddi This is the third and final episode in our series, Our Youth’s Perspective. This has been Jeevana.

  Yonathan Kiflezghie Yonathan.

  Kevin Ramirez And Kevin.

  Jeevana Doddi Thank you so much for listening.

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  Ron Dahl Social media provides an immense range of opportunities for young people to explore, connect, and interact. These are new and rapidly changing social landscapes, filled with uncertainties and risks. We are gradually understanding more and more about how technology, if designed and used appropriately, may provide new ways to explore and learn about ourselves and others, while finding our place in an often confusing and uncertain social world. 

  The more young people understand about how these tools can work for them or against them, the better equipped they are to make choices about how and when to use them–aligned with their own goals and priorities. And in ways that can help prepare them to navigate our rapidly changing world.

  I’m Ron Dahl, and this has been a special episode of Adaptivity from the Center for the Developing Adolescent.

  We’d like to thank Jeevana Doddi, Kevin Ramirez, and Yonathan Kiflezghie from the Center’s Youth Scientific Council on Adolescence for delving into this topic and sharing their reflections with us.

  Thanks also to University of Washington assistant professor of psychology Lucia Magis-Weinberg.

  For more on the developmental science of adolescence and the YSCA, go to our website at developingadolescent.org.

  If you’d like to learn more about the science of adolescence, visit us at adaptivitypodcast.com or share your thoughts through the contact information at our website.

  Our podcast is produced at UC Berkeley for the Center for the Developing Adolescent. Our senior producer is Polly Stryker. Our producer is Meghan Lynch Forder. And our engineer is Rob Speight. 

  A special thanks to Ava Trimble for her facilitation of the YSCA projects.

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