Youth Perspectives on Social Media Harms: A Large-Scale Micro-Narrative Study

The harms experienced on social media are often context-specific, fast-evolving, and experientially diverse, posing challenges for traditional research methods. Conventional approaches frequently lack the descriptive richness, speed, or scale needed to capture such nuanced harms, highlighting the need for innovative, agile methods that centre lived experience. To address this gap, we introduce a novel micro-narrative method, eliciting 901 first-person narratives of recent social media harms from 18–22-year-olds across the UK and US. Using a mixed-methods approach, we analysed these narratives to identify key harm types and map their perceived frequency and platform specificity across our sample. Qualitative analysis identified four overarching harm types: harms that emerge from other people’s behaviour on social media (e.g., cyberbullying, scams); harmful behaviour evoked by social media use in young people themselves (e.g., compulsive use, social comparison); harms related to content observed on social media (e.g., curated or graphic material); and harms related to platform features (e.g., algorithmic exposure). These harms were associated with a wide range of self-reported emotional, cognitive, behavioural, and social consequences, including anxiety, lowered self-esteem, compulsive social media use, and social exclusion. Harms varied in frequency, platform specificity, and perceived prevalence, with self-related and content-related harms occurring most frequently, and harms from others' behaviour reported more rarely. Our findings highlight the diverse and complex nature of social media harms, tracing both behavioural and platform-based origins. By amplifying youth voices and applying an innovative narrative-based approach at scale, this study provides new descriptive evidence to inform youth-centred engagement and policy, targeted interventions, and safer social media platform design.