Over the past two decades, social media has become deeply embedded in the everyday lives of children and teenagers. These platforms shape how young people communicate, form identities, access information, participate in culture, and imagine their place in the world. At the same time, concerns about safety, wellbeing, digital literacy, commercial exploitation, surveillance, and inequality have become central to public debate.
The past few years have marked a profound shift in global awareness of the risks and pressures these platforms can create for young users. A growing number of governments are now moving toward legislation aimed at limiting under 16 access to social media. Australia became the first country to introduce a nationwide age restriction in December 2025, requiring platforms to prevent under 16s from maintaining accounts and imposing large fines for non compliance. Early evaluations show both parent reported benefits and significant challenges, including circumvention by young users and questions about the efficacy of age verification. These developments reflect broader concerns around mental health, data privacy, algorithmic targeting, commercial exploitation, and digital rights.
This Collection invites contributions that critically explore the relationships between children, teenagers and social media, with particular attention to how digital platforms intersect with broader cultural norms, social inequalities, global regulatory shifts, and generational identities. We welcome work from across the humanities and social sciences, including media and communication studies, sociology, psychology (non clinical), education, cultural studies, digital humanities, childhood studies, gender studies, and related fields.
We invite papers that engage with topics including (but not limited to):
- Identity formation and self representation: how young people perform, negotiate or experiment with identity in online spaces
- Digital friendship, intimacy and community: peer cultures, fandoms, group chats, online belonging, emerging social norms and the dynamics of connection and online communities
- Risks, inequalities and digital harm: experiences of cyberbullying, harassment, exclusion, or algorithmic bias; differential experiences across gender, class, race or disability
- Public policy, governance, regulation and global regulation: debates around children’s rights in digital environments, consent, privacy, and the responsibilities of states, platforms and caregivers; national responses to youth social media use—including Australia’s age restriction legislation and similar debates emerging in other countries—as well as platform governance and age verification technologies
- Creativity, play and participation: practices such as gaming, content creation, fandom, memes and remix cultures; children and teenagers as cultural producers
- Platform power, datafication and surveillance: how children’s data are collected, monetised and regulated; youth rights in digital environments; the role of algorithms, moderation practices, datafication and surveillance technologies in shaping youth experiences
- Commercialisation and labour: influencers and micro influencers, branded content, youth creative labour and the blurring of leisure and work
- Mental health narratives and wellbeing discourses: how concerns about anxiety, self esteem or screen time are constructed, mediated and understood culturally and politically; youth perspectives on these narratives
- Global and cross cultural perspectives: how youth engagement with social media varies across linguistic, cultural and national contexts; global South perspectives; diaspora communities
We particularly encourage submissions that bridge disciplinary boundaries, draw on underrepresented or marginalised perspectives, or critically examine dominant assumptions about youth and digital life.
Editors
For more details refer here
