The recent success of the Netflix series Adolescence, which follows the repercussions of a 13-year-old boy’s decision to murder a classmate after being exposed to misogynistic content and cyberbullying, seems driven by a powerful and growing anxiety in modern life: are social media platforms harming young people?
For Lulu Nelleman, 25, an ambassador for the Danish antistigma programme EN AF OS (English: ONE OF US), and Inês Mália Sarmento, a disability rights activist from Portugal, answering this question is not so straightforward.
“Social media can do a lot of good things,” says Lulu. “You can find and follow profiles that talk about the very same things that you struggle with. At the same time, I do sometimes find myself thinking, ‘Why do I still have Instagram?’”
Algorithmic triggering
Lulu was 15 when she started to engage in self-harming behaviour, which she describes as an addiction. It started with cutting before escalating to more serious forms that resulted in trips to the emergency ward. She was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder and developed an eating disorder, which she felt very alone in dealing with.
“I had this issue that I think a lot of people with eating disorders have – the feeling of not being sick enough,” she says.
She began to follow social media accounts, often private, of people with similar mental health struggles, including eating disorders and self-harm. While these accounts were at times helpful, they could also be triggering.
“Some of the profiles shared their recovery and kept saying that you’re always allowed to go into treatment. I was at first intrigued by that, thinking, ‘Maybe I can follow these profiles and do what they do in their recovery’,” says Lulu. “But it’s two-sided –sometimes just following the recovery accounts is triggering as well. For example, some show before and after pictures, and you start to think, ‘I weigh more now than they do in the after picture’.”
Even worse, the algorithms started to suggest other content, showing her gravestones for young people who have died and severely underweight people.
“I often say to friends that Instagram has discovered that I’m mentally ill,” Lulu jokes. “Facebook hasn’t found out yet.”
“Definitely harming us, but we shouldn’t blame the tool”
“The first thing that comes to my mind when I think about social media is influence,” says Inês. “It has a very powerful way of pressing our buttons, pushing whatever we pay attention to.” She says she quickly realized its potential to influence her classmates when she started using Facebook at the age of 13, which, she now reflects, was “way too early”.
Social media became another way to bully others and to covertly talk about issues people her age did not want adults to be alerted to – this could be especially problematic for people with eating disorders like anorexia nervosa and bulimia, which her classmates called “Anna” and “Mia”, respectively.
“My classmates would say, ‘I’m going to go hang out with Anna (or Mia) now’. Adults didn’t know what that meant – one of the ways social media can cause a lot of harm is if adults are not literate in social media use and how things work, they can’t help their children set boundaries,” she explains. “So, I think it’s definitely harming us, but we shouldn’t be blaming the tool.”
“Young people need to be literate in social media use,” Inês continues. “I don’t believe a child can become literate in social media without an adult by their side, who also has to be literate – we have to do this together or we’re not going to get anywhere.”
Nevertheless, she feels grateful to have had social media in her life. “I became very ill and disabled at 14 years old. I didn’t get to experience a normal childhood, adolescence or young adulthood. The normalcy I got was through people in my online community, who were experiencing similar things because they had the same diagnoses, so it was very beneficial to me to have that support, even if I had never been in the same physical space as them.”
Connection, community and participation
Over the years, Lulu worked hard at her recovery, which has been a success – she has stopped self-harming completely. She volunteers as an ambassador for EN AF OS in Denmark, where she tells the story of her experiences in emergency rooms to doctors and nurses working there. This helps to break down stigma towards people who struggle with their mental health, ultimately providing them with better care.
She still uses social media almost every day and even follows accounts that post mental health content. “I follow a few accounts of people who have borderline personality disorder and due to all the stigma about borderline especially, it has helped me to look at my diagnosis in a new way,” she notes.
However, this isn’t the main reason Lulu uses social media. “My timeline is mostly artists, musicians and stuff like that,” she says. “But about once a week I fall into this rabbit hole of triggering content. I get really mad at Instagram because it keeps feeding me so many triggering accounts and posts.”
Why not just stop using it? “You will be excluded from a lot of things if you do,” Lulu says.
Inês has similar feelings. “I often debate if I should delete all my accounts but one of the few things that makes me stick to social media is the connection it enables to other people – colleagues, family or friends. Everybody’s on social media.”
“Everyone is an expert in their own usage”
Both Inês and Lulu are glad to see the attention that policy-makers are giving this issue. Inês warns that one thing governments and leaders should not do is say that social media and digital technology are inherently negative. “When I was younger, if an adult came to me and said that social media are terrible, I wouldn’t even listen to anything else they had to say. I would have wanted to be asked what my experience was. Everyone is an expert in their own usage.”
She also adds: “I wouldn’t listen to someone who has never used social media themselves.”
The meaningful participation of young people in the development of policy related to digital technology use is one of the guiding principles that the WHO Regional Office for Europe outlines in a new policy brief (on which Inês consulted) aimed at addressing the digital determinants of young people’s mental health and well-being.
The brief, available now, proposes that governments and companies must shift from asking: “Are social media platforms harming young people?” to: “How can we make social media safe for young people?”.