Young Adults’ Folk Theories of How Social Media Harms Its Users

The age of digital, and especially social, media has increased the volume of information users encounter and the mediated interactions users are involved in or observe. This study analyzes young adults’ understanding of harmful content online to identify folk theories, the explanations and predictions users develop to help guide their judgments and behavior. In 494 free responses, college students identified 12 online speech acts or trends as harmful. Subjects primarily identified individuals as the ones harmed, the ones responsible for causing harm, and the ones responsible for solving the problem of harms. Content caused harm through a range of mechanisms, such as normalizing hatred, misinforming citizens, or prompting incessant social comparison. Young adults perceive offensive online speech as a pervasive problem, but with limited personal investment in solutions and little hope for mitigating harm. In decades of research on media effects, there’s been extensive developing and testing of expert theories and less qualitative research on how people make sense of media influence. Our study demonstrates that users’ folk theories are cohesive across a range of content types, focused on the actions and experiences of individual users, and emphasize individual solutions to the large-scale issue of social media effects.