The Overlooked User
Social media companies must prioritize and design for teens
By Data & Society Health and Data Program Director Amanda Lenhart and Health and Data Researcher Kellie Owens
As the COVID-19 pandemic rages on, social media platforms have become essential for many adolescents seeking connection with their friends and family. With the waves of stay-at-home measures and remote learning arrangements, social media is one of the only safe places that teens can actually hang out, socialize, and grow up. Meanwhile, parents are left to assess what it means for their children to engage with these technologies in a healthy way. While social media has beneficial elements, it is also optimized for repeated, daily active use and is potentially harmful to the mental health and sense of well-being of some adolescent users, and has some negative effects on adolescent users more generally. Parents and researchers should not be the only ones considering how children engage with social media. Social media companies also need to take responsibility for how adolescents use their platforms.
Social media companies also need to take responsibility for how adolescents use their platforms.
After conducting research with social media company employees over the past eight months, we are concerned by the lack of attention to any subgroup of users, especially adolescents. Many companies rarely take adolescents’ physical and mental health into account when designing their products and features. We were told repeatedly that while youth use social media platforms, on certain sites they do not make up a large enough market share to warrant attention in the product design process. Social media products are generally designed with early adopters in mind, who (much like the designers themselves) tend to be tech-savvy, white, English-speaking adult users. Some social media companies said they choose not to collect data about adolescent users, which leaves employees in the dark about potential concerns for this population. Employees we spoke with also felt wary of designing products specifically for kids, because these products often face high levels of public scrutiny and regulation. But ignoring something won’t make it go away. And in this case, ignoring the needs of adolescents or vulnerable subgroups in the product design process can make social media more harmful for them.
…ignoring the needs of adolescents or vulnerable subgroups in the product design process can make social media more harmful for them.
Minimal attention to the needs of adolescent users in social media product design is particularly troubling because company business models tend to prioritize growth and retention over user well-being. Many social media company employees told us that popular business models were fundamentally in tension with efforts to limit screen time or promote quality interactions. In ad-based business models, for example, employees build incentives for users to spend as much time on a platform as possible, viewing ads and generating data that can be sold and used to target future ads. Company decisions are driven by quantifiable growth metrics, such as daily active users and time spent on the platform. Employee efforts to improve civility, safety, and health—and to design products with the needs of adolescents and other subgroups of users in mind—are often seen as “blocking” or needlessly complicating a process designed to quickly implement new features that can improve the growth metrics that investors and shareholders value.
Social media companies should be held accountable for the decisions they make that privilege profits over people.
During the pandemic, social media platforms can play a crucial role in fostering connections between adolescents’ friends and families. However, parents should not be the only ones responsible for how adolescents engage with social media platforms. Social media companies should be held accountable for the decisions they make that privilege profits over people. The good news is that many of these companies already employ workers tasked with thinking about user well-being. Some platforms with higher numbers of adolescent users, as with some social gaming platforms, have specific teams trying to improve users’ experiences by creating a positive digital culture. Social media companies can start taking responsibility for how adolescents engage on their platforms by empowering these employees and following their advice. These employees can’t be siloed in policy or trust and safety roles — their input needs to be included at all levels of the design process. While this would require structural realignment at many social media companies, change is long overdue. This is especially true in a world where social media has suddenly become adolescents’ classroom, schoolyard, and playground all at once.
Amanda Lenhart leads the health and data initiative at Data & Society, and is an internationally recognized expert on youth and technology.
Kellie Owens is a researcher on the health and data team, and a sociologist who explores the relationships between technology and health.
