Representative image / Pexels

“I just felt like I wanted to be on it all the time, and if I wasn't on it, I felt like I was going to miss out on something.”

A young woman’s testimony in a recent landmark trial against big tech platforms rings familiar. As a youth and media researcher at Rutgers University, I’ve been talking to teens across the US about their media use for the last four years, and I’ve never stopped hearing them tell me how stressful it can get. Kaley G.M v Meta et al. has reignited debates around teens’ social media use, but it is also a stark reminder that we must do better for young people––and we can.

As a former US Surgeon General reminded us, young people’s lives are “happening now”. Indeed, it’s easy to agree that families with children and adolescents who are growing up amidst an explosion of new technologies cannot wait for years for courts to decide whether certain apps are addictive or not, and how to deal with the harms retrospectively. The stakes are too high. Closer home, we can do better for our youth with small, but consequential, shifts in the way we think and talk about media design with young people.

A little more than 20 years after the arrival of the first big social media platform, it’s time to reorient how we understand teen media use, backed by evidence-based research. I'd like to invite readers to think about three interconnected ideas:

1.  Teen Agency: We must recognize that teen agency in media use emerges from a unique and challenging juncture in youth development. When teens’ cognitive developmental characteristics intersect with media design that taps into developmental vulnerabilities, navigating such a media landscape becomes really complicated for young people. 

2.    Developmental Characteristics: Rather than focus on what teens are doing with technology, families can benefit by thinking about what is developmental about teens’ media use and how that knowledge can drive better decision making about media choices. This can sometimes be hard to tease apart but the effort is absolutely worth it.

3.    Youth Voices: We must listen very carefully and patiently to what teens are telling us, as their words hold the key to the intensity of their experiences in what I call an “Ambient AI” media environment. For reference, Ambient AI refers to the ubiquity and pervasiveness of machine prediction in everyday media use. 

To achieve this reframing, I like to use the analogy of a photograph. What we choose to foreground and what we choose to nudge into the background are crucial to what we see and how we understand what the picture is about. Too often, the broader public commentary about young people and technology tends to headline problematic use, and focus on technological features. Whether it is the Facebook whistleblower’s testimony in 2021 or the Kaley G.M. v Meta case in 2026, we hear about infinite scroll, personalized recommendations, notifications, and how social media platforms are optimized for time spent and engagement. While these “frictionless” features are incredibly important, it’s more impactful to think about how teen development intersects with such design. 

Adolescent entanglement with media design is not the same as an adult's; it's much more stressful for an adolescent to navigate design features that predict with increasing accuracy an endless spool of the most engaging content. When teens introduce “frictions” (e.g., reminders, intentional pauses), it suggests that they are thinking about their own thinking, reflecting on their media practices, and recalibrating. But this is not easy!

During the teen years, adolescents are more easily persuaded by things that are pleasing—or “rewards”. In the modern media environment, these rewards typically surface in the form of personalized recommendations. However, this is the exact juncture in development when teens are still developing the ability to plan and prioritize, but that is happening at a much more gradual and gentler pace. This maturational asymmetry— think about a race car with brakes still getting built—is key to understanding why teens are so easily drawn toward, and often feel trapped by, media design that is engineered to be “irresistible”. 

Even before media design becomes problematic for the developing adolescent, there’s something to be said for how and why teens begin using platforms such as Instagram, Snapchat or TikTok. To cite an example from the Kaley G.M v Meta trial, the plaintiff Kaley started using YouTube at age 6, Instagram at age 9, TikTok at age 10 and Snapchat at age 11. Although each child’s experiences are unique, developmental theory tells us that adolescents are especially sensitive to social validation from peers and there is a shift from parent to peer focus during adolescence. 

Teens' media choices are often influenced by peers, and the pressures of “performing” friendship online. Thinking about Instagram or Snapstreaks through this lens suggests that peer orientation as well as heightened sensitivity to rewards have a role in cranking up the stress for teens. 

Both teens and their parents are acutely aware of social media effects but teens feel the negative impacts more intensely. A recent state-wide survey conducted by the Teens, Family and Technology Lab at Rutgers in collaboration with the New Jersey Department of Education showed that families of teens are most concerned about social media’s impact on teens’ sleep, physical activity and academic performance. As the researchers note in this report, social media apps have now become “domesticated” within the family unit, leading to a greater shared understanding of their risks and benefits. As an extension of this collective understanding, states are now considering new guardrails for personal devices during the school day. 

Teens’ media landscape is a shifting one, not static; it is a scene of competition involving teens, families, educators, and tech companies. When we listen patiently to teens, their voices can illuminate the path toward better conversations about their relationship with technology. 

Dr. Nikhila Natarajan is an adjunct professor at Rutgers University specializing in teens’ experiences with AI-powered technologies, and age-appropriate media design. Dr. Natarajan is a co-founder of the Teens, Family and Technology Lab at Rutgers School of Communication and Information. 

(The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of New India Abroad.)

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