In many schools today, conversations about social media sound different than they did just a few years ago. Students still rely on Snapchat to communicate with friends, scroll TikTok for entertainment, and use Instagram to document their lives, but many are also beginning to question how those platforms affect their well-being.
“Things have changed significantly from when I first started this work to the present day,” says Trisha Prabhu, founder and CEO of ReThink Citizens, a youth-led nonprofit that equips young people with digital wellness skills and tools to lead digital wellness initiatives. Prabhu says that over the past five years, students (and adults) have become much more aware of how social media platforms can negatively affect young people.
That growing self-awareness is supported by recent survey data: nearly half (48 percent) of teens now say social media harms people their age, according to a Pew Research Center survey, up from 32 percent in 2022 (Faverio, 2025).
The Benefits and Challenges of Social Media
Adolescent use of social media paints a complex picture. Social media fulfills real human needs for young people and can amplify both positives and negatives of in-person relationships.
“For adolescents . . . it’s really important to develop friendships, to be seen by their peer group, be valued, respected . . . feel belonging,” says Olga Kornienko, an associate professor of applied developmental psychology at George Mason University. “That’s why adolescents are such avid and active users [of social media]. Because it’s really tapping into their developmental needs and what they’re focusing on.”
However, social media use can also cause stress. Caroline Toth, a doctoral student working with Kornienko, studies digital stress, the anxiety that can accompany online interactions with friends.
“You go online, you see a picture of your friends hanging out, and you’re not there in the picture,” Toth explained. “[Adolescents] see that their picture . . . it’s not getting any likes, it’s not getting any comments. That triggers that anxiety about achieving peer approval.”
According to Toth, social media and its related stressors don’t exist separately from students’ offline lives—these online experiences are woven into in-person friendships. High school English teacher Kiana Espinoza Almeter has heard this from her own students, who value the connections social media creates, but also recognize that it can shape their perceptions, increase anxiety, affect their attention spans, and make it difficult to put their phones down. “So it’s both this point of connection and this point of anxiety,” Espinoza Almeter says. Having healthy boundaries around social media is the biggest challenge she sees her students facing.
For many students, social media is both a “point of connection and point of anxiety.”
Luckily, some students are starting to recognize this need for balance and do something about it. Madison P., an undergraduate student at UCLA, sees the benefits of social media—“It can open doors and show you what a career could look like, or different colleges, or motivate someone to work toward something special”—but when she first started using social media as a freshman in high school, she also quickly figured out its downsides. She says she was focused on creating content rather than experiencing life. “I lost touch of taking everything in and being present and not just shaping my life to what I wanted my social media to look like.” She is now a leader with GoodforMEdia, a youth-led peer mentoring and education program through the Stanford Center for Youth Mental Health and Wellbeing that helps students build healthier relationships with social media and advocate for healthier digital experiences.
Madison’s conflicting feelings about social media use are not uncommon. The Pew Survey also found that more teens reported spending too much time on social media than they did just two years ago (45 percent compared with 36 percent in 2022). However, 74 percent said that it makes them feel more connected to their friends, and 63 percent saw it as an outlet for their creativity.
More and more, “Young people are actually co-opting these social media tools in service of community and connection and identity development,” says Alison Lee, chief research and development officer at The Rithm Project, a nonprofit seeking to increase human connection in the age of AI. Previously, she worked on safety and integrity research at Instagram and responsible AI at Meta. Lee says that rather than accepting social media how it’s delivered to them, students are now questioning how platforms work, recognizing how algorithms influence their experiences, and making more intentional choices about how they engage online.
Helping Students Understand the System
Recent lawsuits against Meta (Facebook and Instagram), Google (YouTube), Snap Inc. (Snapchat), and TikTok—some of which have been brought by students and their families—have highlighted concerns around the design of the platforms and their potential for negative effects on youth (Tamez-Robledo, 2026). Students and families suing have claimed that extended regular use of these platforms and their features, such as beauty filters and targeted algorithms, have led to body image issues, depression, anxiety, and self-harm, and that the companies knew of these dangers and chose to ignore them.
“We can’t place the blame on adolescents . . . it’s not like adolescents have no control,” explains professor Kornienko. “Platforms were designed to be irresistible.”
But the solution doesn’t seem to be school phone bans, either. The experts interviewed for this story agreed that it’s not about eliminating social media. Instead, they say that educators should teach students how these platforms work and support them in coming up with strategies to use them in healthy ways.
One way to do this is to help students understand how social media algorithms work, Kornienko says. Tell students, “If you don’t have 5,000 likes, it doesn’t mean that no one is paying attention.”
Educator Stephan Lambert says, “Part of it is raising awareness of how digital dopamine works . . . helping students understand that this system has been built to exploit our attention. If they have that recognition, they can understand the app is not going to regulate you for you.” Lambert oversees Orange County Department of Education (OCDE)’s prevention education, including Well Connected, an initiative where high school students create videos, digital content, and other peer-to-peer resources promoting healthy technology use.
Lambert and Stephanie Loscko, a program specialist for youth development programs, student initiatives, partnerships, and events at OCDE, both say that the students they work with are aware they’re getting pulled in and scrolling for longer than they want to. Loscko leads OCDE’s Student Advocates for Mental Health Program, working with elementary, middle, and high school student leaders to empower them to promote mental health and healthy decision making in their schools, and she says that social media is a topic that her students often choose to discuss in the workshops they lead for other students, staff, and parents.
Sleep deprivation seems to be the most significant impact Lambert and Loscko see with their students, particularly among older teens. Students are charging their phones in their bedrooms, and it’s all too tempting to keep scrolling or check just one more notification. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends keeping phones and other devices out of bedrooms and avoiding screen use before bedtime since digital media use is associated with shorter sleep duration and poorer sleep health among children and adolescents (Munzer, 2026). But as youth leader Madison P. explains, “Sometimes I think sleep and everything is less important [than] feeling like you’re fitting in [as] a kid.”
Decreased focus and attention seems to be another spillover effect that many students bring to the classroom. During a recent lesson on Fahrenheit 451, Espinoza Almeter’s students commented that it’s good that the video she showed them on the topic was only a minute long because they have short attention spans. As one student put it, “My attention span is about the length of a TikTok video.” That perception is echoed in the research. Recent studies have linked greater social media use among youth with increased inattention symptoms and difficulty maintaining focus (Fabio, 2026; Nivins, 2026).
Starting Conversations, Not Lectures
So how should educators approach discussions about social media with their students? It’s not about gathering everyone in an auditorium for a lecture, Madison P. says. It’s about building on the personal connections teachers have already developed with students. She remembers these kinds of relationships with her teachers in high school. “The ones that took the time to have the small conversations with me were the ones that got me through my high school years.”
Students are questioning how platforms work, recognizing how algorithms influence their experiences, and making more intentional choices about how they engage online.
“I would start the conversation, first and foremost, about what it feels like to be a teenager today,” suggests Lee. “How does social media help or hurt those relationships? Then it doesn’t become a binary zero-sum game of social media is all bad or social media is all good.”
Students don’t simply need warnings about online dangers. They need help navigating everyday social situations online. “They really need help figuring out the dynamics of FOMO and being excluded . . . navigating group chats . . . those are the kind of things that would be really helpful,” says Vicki Harrison, program director at Stanford Center for Youth Mental Health and Wellbeing.
Both Loscko and Lambert emphasized that those conversations should begin with empathy rather than judgment, helping students reflect on their experiences instead of shaming them for their social media use.
Students are also watching the adults in their lives. “As adults, we need to be modeling how to use it in a positive way,” says Espinoza Almeter. “This is not just a young people issue.”
When Students Take Ownership
Helping students develop the skills to navigate social media thoughtfully takes ongoing conversations, intentional instruction, and opportunities to practice making healthy choices. “Our big bet is to help young people build the discernment and agency to make the choices on their own,” says Lee.
Digital wellness education should start early and be integrated throughout grade levels. Lee asks, “How do you teach young people the skills for repair and care before you get to the point where social media . . . becomes a place where all that becomes public?” Lambert agrees that finding balance with screen time and other activities “starts extremely early.” Loscko has witnessed the importance of introducing these ideas in elementary school and suggests educators begin talking to students in kindergarten. Teachers can also integrate short digital wellness lessons into their classrooms, such as conducting a five-minute algorithm mapping exercise, creating a class contract for phone-free zones, or assigning a digital audit reflection.
Perhaps the most encouraging sign is that many students are already beginning to speak up for themselves, change their habits, and work toward better systems. Prabhu’s nonprofit, ReThink Citizens, hosts a youth coalition incubator, where students develop ideas for improving the digital world into working prototypes. They’ve had participants as young as 7th graders in the program. These students are not only recognizing that the digital spaces they spend so much time in are far from perfect, but they’re also doing something about it. Prabhu herself at age 13 invented ReThink, a mobile app that detects potentially hurtful language and gives teens an in-the-moment nudge to pause before posting potentially harmful messages online.
Loscko has seen that same leadership in the students she works with. Students participating in her Mental Health 101 workshop were concerned about the impact of social media on mental health and worked with her to create their own Screens and Teens workshop, where they could talk peer-to-peer about the positives and negatives of social media. One student in Screens and Teens suggested making their family dinner table a phone-free zone. After trying it for a week, the family enjoyed it so much that they made it a permanent rule.
Prabhu is optimistic about what this means for the future. “To see young people who are really motivated to point out the challenges, to point out the harms, to invent solutions, like so many of our young people are. . . [is] proof that they’re not going to take this lying down. They’re going to do something. They’re going to build the internet that they deserve. And that gives me a lot of hope.”