Social Media is Disproportionately Hurting Girls

Parents Need to Have These Conversations with Their Daughters

Intro from Zach Rausch and Jon Haidt:

One of the most consistent findings in the correlational research on social media and mental health is that girls are disproportionately at risk of harm from heavy social media use compared to boys. In Chapter 6 of The Anxious Generation, we discussed the range of harms that hit girls harder than boys, including visual social comparison, perfectionism, relational aggression, social contagion, and online predation.

However, there is much more to this story than what we covered in that chapter. Thankfully, at the same time The Anxious Generation was published (March 2024), another important book was published on this same topic: Over the Influence: Why Social Media is Toxic for Women and Girls – And How We Can Take It Back. The author is Kara Alaimo, Associate Professor of Communication at Fairleigh Dickinson University. In this post, Kara provides a summary of her new book, including practical solutions to help parents better prepare their daughters for life online. Kara endorses the four norms we propose in The Anxious Generation while also advocating for more comprehensive education for both parents and teens on the harms of social media. Kara goes far deeper into the lives of girls than we were able to in our chapter on girls.

– Zach and Jon

p.s. We plan to publish many more pieces exploring the role of education and digital literacy. We also plan to publish more pieces on the unique challenges boys and men face online. For a preview of that, see our post on why we are increasingly worried about boys, too.

---

In The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt lays out some of the reasons why social media (especially visually-oriented platforms like Instagram and TikTok) tends to harm girls more than boys, on average. Girls often spend more time on these visually-oriented apps. They’re more affected by perfectionism and social comparisons. Because girls tend to be more relational, they’re particularly hurt by things like online gossip and other forms of cyberbullying that impact their reputations. He also reports that girls are more affected by the emotions of the people around them. And, of course, girls are more vulnerable to predation.

“Social media is a trap that ensnares more girls than boys,” he writes.

I have found the same thing. As a communication professor and CNN contributor, my research, writing and teaching focus on what social media is doing to us all. At nearly every turn, I have seen that women and girls are most affected by the harms inflicted by social networks.

For this reason, I interviewed women and girls across the country about their experiences on social media for my new book “Over the Influence: Why Social Media is Toxic for Women and Girls – And How We Can Take It Back.” Published in March, the book follows the arc of a woman’s life and explains how social media is impacting every aspect of it – from the teen years to online dating, our careers, and even how we parent our children. Every chapter ends with a section called “What We Can Do About It,” laying out realistic things users can do and demand from tech companies and lawmakers to solve these problems.

There’s an old saying that we write the books we need to read. As the mom of daughters, part of my motivation for conducting this research was that I was trying to figure out how I would handle my own girls’ use of social media. In The Anxious Generation, Jon laid out 4 new norms: no smartphones before high school, no social media before age 16, phone-free schools, and more unsupervised play and childhood independence.

These are essential solutions. In addition, my research makes clear that we need to talk to our daughters—ideally long before they start using social media—about some of the pressures and dangers they’ll be up against and how they can best handle them. Four of the big ones we need to discuss are (1) content that overemphasizes personal appearance, (2) the sexism and misogyny they’ll see, (3) sexting, and (4) the dangers of dating apps.

Conversation 1. Appearance-Driven Content

One of the most common problems related to social media is the heavy emphasis on personal appearances on many apps. The first chapter of my book, “Girl Meets Instagram,” looks at what happens when girls join social media for the first time. I tell the story of a woman who asked me to call her Vivian. She wrote to me after reading one of my CNN columns and told me her eating disorder as a teenager was driven by her use of Instagram. Vivian joined the app at age 15 and was into yoga, so she posted a picture of herself doing a handstand. That picture was picked up by a so-called “fitspo” (for the uninitiated, “fitness inspiration”) page, which sucked her down a rabbit hole of toxic fitspo content. Soon, she was counting calories herself. Today, in her 20s, Vivian continues to struggle with an eating disorder, even after years of treatment.

Social networks don’t just fail to protect girls from such content – often, their algorithms actively push it to them. For a simple demonstration, the Center for Countering Digital Hate set up accounts pretending to be a 13-year-old on TikTok and paused on and liked content about mental health and body image. Within minutes, the app was serving up posts about suicide and eating disorders.

Like Jon, I’m particularly worried about girls because girls often spend more time on visually oriented apps, where they’re bombarded with images of other peoples’ seemingly flawless lives and bodies. Of course, the so-called “Instagram body” can usually only be achieved offline through surgery. But social apps don’t send signals to remind us that the photos we see are often heavily manipulated.

This is why we need to talk to our children about why they shouldn’t compare themselves to the highly filtered and curated content they see online. We also need to talk about why we shouldn’t judge anyone – including and, in fact, especially ourselves – for their appearances. If children are still young, it’s a good idea to start having these conversations before they join social media. But even if they’re already on Instagram, it’s never too late.

In her important book “Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia,” Cornell philosopher Kate Manne wrote about how she sat down with her young daughter and pulled up photos of people of different races, sizes, and types of ability on Instagram – then remarked that she’s glad the people whose images they viewed are in the world with us. It’s one of the most beautiful ways I’ve ever heard of teaching kids this lesson.

Conversation 2. Sexism and Misogyny

As I write in Over the Influence, on mainstream social networks, kids are often exposed to sexism and misogyny. “Extremist misogyny that was once really segregated to platforms like Reddit forums is now disseminating onto much more popular platforms like TikTok and permeating into youth culture more generally,” Kaitlyn Regher, an associate professor in digital humanities at University College London, told me in an interview for my book. “It’s much more socially acceptable to throw around incel terminology now.” What we’re talking about here are things like “jokes” about what a woman’s anatomy looks like after violent sex.

This is why it’s essential for us to talk to kids about what they’re seeing online so we can reflect together about whether it’s in keeping with our values and how we can process and respond to it. I have been speaking to parents and teachers in schools about how to handle kids’ use of social media. A lot of parents tell me they’re intimidated by the idea of having these conversations because they don’t fully understand how some of the social networks their kids are on work. Don’t be. You don’t need to know how to create a viral TikTok yourself to sit down at the dinner table and ask your child what kinds of things they’ve been seeing on their social apps lately. (Bonus: this is also a good way of bonding with your child by learning more about what interests them.) As part of this conversation, you can say that you’ve heard there are some very hateful things on these apps, like posts that suggest it’s funny to hurt people. Ask if they’ve seen them and how they feel about them. Then you can share how you feel about them.

Conversation 3. Sexting

Another thing that puts girls at risk is the widely held expectation among peers for them to share intimate images. Shocking though it may be to us as parents, among young people today, this is the norm. One girl who I interviewed for my book – with whom I was put in touch by her mother – explained to me that she and her friends take these images in advance of being asked for them and store them on My Eyes Only on Snapchat, so they’re at the ready when requested.

It’s essential for parents to talk to kids about why they should never take, share, or ask for such images. For starters, children could be prosecuted for producing child pornography of themselves. What’s more, those images could be hacked or shared with others when a relationship sours – or just for kicks.

Often children are targeted by someone online who establishes an emotional relationship with them and convinces them to share one racy image. Then the next message that comes through is something like: “Venmo me $500 in the next hour or I’m going to post this on social media and message it to all your friends and family members.” This is called sextortion. According to a lawsuit against Snap filed by the Attorney General of New Mexico last year, by 2022, the company had 10,000 monthly reports of sextortion and believed that to represent just a fraction of the instances that were occuring on its platform. He is also suing Meta for allowing adults to solicit pornography from kids on its platforms.

As I write in Over the Influence, when these intimate images end up online, it’s often life-destroying. It can put victims at greater risk of sexual assault, depression, and suicide. It can also make it harder for them to date or get a job. Often kids don’t think through these potential consequences, so it’s critical for us to talk about them.

This is also why lawyers who handle cases of cyber sexual exploitation have told me one of the most important things parents need to tell their children is that, even if they break all the rules, if they get in trouble online, they can come to them for help without fear of the consequences. One attorney told me she’d seen some girls afraid to tell their parents they were being sextorted because they were worried about having their phones taken away.

Conversation 4. How Dating Apps Can Facilitate Sexual Assault

As our daughters move into their dating years, the physical dangers they face on social apps are in some ways heightened. One of my biggest concerns is dating apps. The United States doesn’t keep statistics on how many violent crimes are tied to them, which is awfully convenient for these companies. However, in 2019, Columbia Journalism Investigations published the results of what it called a non-scientific survey of over 1,200 women who had dated online over the previous 15 years. An astounding 31% of them said they’d been raped or sexually assaulted by someone they had met online. If this number is anywhere close to accurate, online dating is far, far more dangerous than most people appreciate.

While dating apps have been widely hailed as a valuable way to meet people, according to a 2020 Pew survey, the majority of women say dating is harder now than it was 10 years ago. (The majority of men disagree.)

In Over the Influence, I explore how online dating has turned people into commodities to be quickly swiped on and how, as part of the “online disinhibition effect,” users are willing to treat others far worse online than they would in person.

Women I interviewed said our culture left them feeling like they were overly emotional or needy if they asked for what they wanted on these apps– like better behavior, or a real relationship.

One good idea, of course, is not to use dating apps at all. If our daughters do use them, it’s critical to offer tips on how to protect their safety. For example, they should video message a person before agreeing to meeting up with them in person to confirm that they seem to be who they say they are (a lot of sextortionists are being held as slaves themselves in places like Cambodia). If they meet up offline with someone who they met online, they should tell people where they are going and make sure the person they’re meeting knows that their loved ones know where they are. And they should never be alone with someone until they have solid evidence they can be trusted.

Of course, I’m only getting started here. There’s a lot more in my book on the dangers our daughters face, and on the conversations that can help them. Sadly, most kids aren’t learning about these dangers in school. I recently created a new academic program in social media at Fairleigh Dickinson University, and many of my undergraduates tell me that my classes are the first place they have ever been educated about how to protect and empower themselves on social media. While schools should also be incorporating these topics as part of their curricula, it’s essential for parents to stay in ongoing discussion with their kids about what they’re seeing online, the risks they could face, and how to handle them. As these dangers continue to evolve, so too should our conversations, and our national norms. Our daughters would face so much less danger, and they’d be so much more capable of protecting themselves, if most of us waited until high school to give them a smartphone and until 16 to let them open social media accounts.