6

PLAYING IT SAFE

Parents, Privacy, and “Appropriate Behavior”

“The way the media treats women on the edge of adulthood sets a standard for limiting their political and social power for the rest of their lives.”

—GOETZMAN 2014:1

In May 2019, a New Jersey online newspaper reported a story about a twenty-three-year-old man who attempted to lure a twelve-year-old girl into a sexual encounter using social media with the headline “Family Catches Online Predator Trying to Lure 12-Year-Old N.J. Girl for Sex through Social Media, Prosecutor Says” (Attrino 2019). Using an undisclosed chatting application, the man contacted the girl, initiated sexually explicit dialogue, and suggested they meet in person. The family of the girl found out about the online communication and intervened, reporting the man to local authorities. Detectives from the county cybercrime unit traveled to Delaware armed with a search warrant and proceeded to arrest the man on counts of luring, attempted aggravated sexual assault, and attempted endangering the welfare of a child. In the article, the girl’s role and perspective are not mentioned at all; we are given no sense of how she interacted with this person, whether she responded to advances, and how they made her feel. Although understandable that the article seeks to protect the privacy of a minor, the total lack of her presence in the story situates her without voice and the reader without context. The article is peppered with inserted clickbait links to other websites such as “Predators use these 19 apps to lure minors. This is what parents need to know.”

A quick Internet search on safety tips for parents with kids and teens on social media reveals countless websites and blog posts about the subject, most of which emphasize a tone of concern or outright fear: “A Complete Guide to Potentially Dangerous Apps All Parents Should Be Aware Of” (Rohm Nulsen 2023), “What Do Parents Need to Know about Teens and Sexting” (Ehrenreich 2020), “The Facts about Online Predators Every Parent Should Know” (Elgersma 2017), “11 Parental Control and Monitoring Apps We Recommend in 2023” (Modglin and McCormick 2024). These websites are geared toward parents gaining knowledge about how to mediate and potentially intervene in what their children are doing online. The headlines clearly capitalize on adult fears with language like dangerous, predators, and need to know.

What kind of information leads to and reproduces gendered moral panic about tween girls on social media? And how is that information being framed (Cohen 1972; Driscoll and Gregg 2008; Thiel-Stern 2014)? I contextualize the risks tween girls face online and investigate how popular and public media often capitalize on adult concerns by reiterating inflammatory narratives of the ways girls are perceived to be at risk in digital space, including fears brought to the fore by the Pretty or Ugly YouTube trend. Tween girls internalize parental concerns, and they emphasize the role parents play in establishing rules and determining what is appropriate and inappropriate online content. They also articulate how the age of a girl matters in characterizing and enacting safety on social media.

Tween girls demonstrated their digital knowledge to me in how they make accounts public versus private, how they follow someone or let someone follow them, and how they block someone from seeing their content. Incorporating what they learn from parents, peers, and through their own use, tween girls develop strategies of assessing risk and potential harm and learn to keenly balance the importance and desire to participate on social media and maintain visibility and self-presentation with keeping themselves safe in digital spaces.

In 1999, sociologist Barry Glassner published The Culture of Fear. In it, Glassner argues that it is not the actual level of risk and danger that has increased in the lives of Americans in recent decades but rather the perception of risk and danger. Glassner points out the strategic functions of social institutions and organizations that profit from the cultivation of fear in American society, using fear to regulate and control everyday social practices. Crucially, fear is not necessarily related to a direct level or possibility of a specific risk or threat; it is a product of perception and how the media shapes public perceptions of critical social and cultural issues (Glassner 1999). The overarching connotation from the web search on keeping children safe online is that parents fear (or should fear) their children putting themselves at risk of victimization by online predators. However, my findings show that tween girls largely use social media to connect with friends and engage their interests (Farrell 2022; Metcalfe and Llewellyn 2020; Ringrose et al. 2013). Parents play a significant role in helping tween girls learn not only to use and navigate these platforms but also to approach them with a level of fear and caution.

All twenty-six of my interviewees articulated having some form of parental involvement in their social media use, whether having discussions with parents about social media or parents looking over the content girls intend to post. More than this, I found that girls rely heavily on their parents and other adult figures they trust in mediating and navigating social media use and participation, particularly in a younger tween age bracket of ten or eleven years old. The girls in my study both outwardly articulate the paramount position of parents in managing social media participation and demonstrate an internalization of adult-centered fears and concerns about girls’ visibility on social media.

The Goetzman (2014) quote that opens this chapter brings to the fore the harm that media does in impacting girls’ social and political power when they are painted in stark terms and positioned solely as vulnerable subjects. Societally speaking, we cannot and should not paint online space as inherently bad, perilous, or hazardous for tween girls. Nor can or should we proclaim it as inherently good, safe, secure, and democratizing. Gendered power dynamics inform all our social structures, institutions, and relationships, including social media, which necessarily colors how adult stakeholders feel about girls participating on these platforms. That said, most American tween girls are now living their lives in a fluid exchange between offline and online interactions and experiences (Anderson 2018; Common Sense Media 2018; Vogels, Gelles-Watnick, and Massarat 2022), and that reality is unlikely to change. Social media participation and visibility have become normal parts of their daily lives. As today’s tween girls grow up on social media, they learn how to balance the importance of online visibility (Banet-Weiser 2014; Harris 2004b; Shields Dobson 2015; Zaslow 2009) with understanding risks and internalizing fears associated with that visibility. Some of this balance they learn by themselves, some from their peers, and a noteworthy amount from their parents.

Contextualizing Risk: What Are the Fears?

Cassell and Cramer write in their 2008 article “High Tech or High Risk: Moral Panics about Girls Online,”

In recent years, networks have broadcast several news media and popular media stories of children, almost always girls, some as young as nine or ten, being sought out by Internet predators (Borrelli 2018; Nicolaou 2020; Russell 2019). Private information is collected and shared, and strange men target and solicit girls for online sex or explicit images and videos of their bodies. Stories warn against girls sharing too much information and suggest that the best defense for avoiding unwanted online attention is to not make oneself vulnerable in the first place, often trumpeting the tagline “What happens on the Internet, stays on the Internet.” Parents of young girls, and young girls themselves, appear to be the most common intended audiences for these provocative stories, websites, and online organizations.

The story of the girl in New Jersey needs to be taken seriously. No child should ever be the victim of any form of violence, period. The way such stories are reported, however, can work to reproduce gendered moral panic that renders the perceived threat of online predators ultimately more substantial than is perhaps necessary or useful. When news media and online news outlets report about an online predator, whether at a local or national level, the story may proliferate, get shared on various sites and platforms, and become widely available to audiences via the information-passing nature of the Internet. Incendiary headlines become clickbait influencing more clicks and shares, and as the story becomes more popular, it plays more heavily on societal fears and perceptions. People are left feeling like these incidents are common. But the hyperbolized spin of these kinds of stories distracts from a crucial reality of child abuse and violence, whether sexual or otherwise; most of these occurrences are not taking place online but in private spaces such as homes, and they are most often perpetrated by a person a child knows and trusts (boyd 2014; Wolak, Finkelhor, and Mitchell 2008).

A study conducted by the Crimes against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire finds that reports of unwanted sexual solicitation online declined well over 50 percent between 2000 and 2010. This study analyzes findings from the 2010 Youth Internet Safety Study (YISS), which indicate that 9 percent of young people (ages ten to seventeen) had received unwanted sexual solicitation; importantly, these solicitations more often than not came from fellow youth, not adult strangers (Jones, Mitchell, and Finkelhor 2012). However, the image of the creepy adult man stalking young girls and asking for sexually explicit content on the Internet is powerful, and the possibility of sexual predation is regularly cited as a prominent concern adults have about tween girls online. There has been some indication that sexual predation increased during the COVID-19 pandemic; this needs to be addressed in earnest (Jakes 2021; O’Donnell 2021), yet the research is cloudy and indefinite. It is difficult to parse whether this increase is statistically significant given the overall increase of Internet use that occurred during the first year of the COVID pandemic.

Communications scholar Amy Hasinoff poignantly suggests that “girls’ online media production and forms of digital authorship are seen as dangerous and irresponsible if they merely self-identify as young and female” (2013:452). From a social constructionist lens that inscribes meanings to a gender binary, the discursive framing of being young and female online as inherently risky in the American adult social imaginary precludes any possibility of tween girls experiencing gender equity and empowerment in digital space. Tween girls across identity categories can be and are agential online and in their social media use (Barner 2016; Erigha and Crooks-Allen 2020; Farrell 2022; Preston-Sidler 2015; Shields Dobson 2015; Wade 2019a), and to suggest that girls are in danger by virtue of assigned sex category and age alone is to critically flatten the empowering and liberatory possibilities of digital space.

In addition to sexual predators, adults fear that strangers may gain and use private information against young girls. They worry about tween girls posting sexualized content and this content living on the Internet forever with the potential to damage or negatively impact girls’ reputations and possibilities for future careers, relationships, opportunities, and so on (Albury and Crawford 2012; Ramirez et al. 2022; Sales 2016; Salter 2016). There is also a concern among older generations that young people today are addicted to social media and unable to connect in other more “meaningful” ways (boyd 2014). Furthermore, recent years have seen an uptick in inquiry into moral panic surrounding teen sexting, which is defined as sending sexually explicit photographs or messages via mobile phone (Best and Bogle 2014; Hasinoff 2013; Klettke, Hallford, and Mellor 2014; Lippman and Campbell 2014; Salter 2016). Because sexting occurs most often through private messaging and not via social media applications, it is not within the scope of my study, but it certainly demands further sociological inquiry as a recognized cultural phenomenon, prominent practice of tween and teen digital communication, and catalyst for contemporary gendered moral panics.

Some view tween girls as narcissists, obsessed with looking at themselves and taking selfies to post and publicize on social media (Boursier, Gioia, and Griffiths 2020; Dvorak 2013; Saeed 2017).

Cyberbullying has emerged as a chief concern, as well as social media use among youth as a public health issue. These arguments frame social media as responsible for increases in depression and anxiety among American youth—and among girls in particular (Attia 2023; Keles, McCrae, and Grealish 2020; Kelly et al. 2018; Salomon 2017; Seabrook, Kern, and Rickard 2016; Twenge 2023; Vidal et al. 2020; Valkenburg, Meier, and Beyens 2022). This picture is more complex than it first appears. As mentioned in the previous chapter, cyberbullying is frequently defined in various ways, and its logics and legibility often differ between adults and youth. Much of the research on social media as correlated with depression and anxiety in adolescents is systematic review, cross-sectional methodology, and there remains a general dearth of qualitative inquiry and longitudinal study design to provide a fuller conception of the impacts and influence of social media on adolescents across and within identity categories. It is imperative that we address social media use with nuance and that tween girls are an active part of that conversation.

The Pretty or Ugly YouTube trend and responses to it showcase how a variety of adult-centered fears are brought to the fore as girls make their bodies available on a public digital platform. In 2012 and 2013, as the trend was growing and being picked up by the news media, reaction and commentary from adult journalists, health professionals, and a handful of academics emphasized how girls are already vulnerable in digital space and how the trend was only exacerbating the issue (Nurka 2014; Italie 2012). Importantly, the tween girls making videos as part of the trend were blamed for making themselves targets for not only predators and trolls but also public scrutiny and derision. The trend was largely considered evidence of a gendered crisis of self-esteem (Banet-Weiser 2014; Nurka 2014; Orenstein 1994).

These alarmist reactions are underscored by gendered narratives of girls as more vulnerable to criticism and more likely to seek and need approval from external sources. Some news stories labeled the trend “dangerous” and “disturbing” (Maldonado 2013; Quenqua 2014) while others called it “sad” or “heartbreaking” (Kennedy 2013; Waldman 2013). Emma Gray of HuffPost wrote of the trend, “Given how fragile kids are at this stage, not to mention privacy concerns and the potential longevity of Internet exposure, bloggers have responded to these videos by urging YouTube to shut them down” (2012:para. 7). The tween girls making Pretty or Ugly videos were labeled either profoundly insecure or overly confident and attention seeking and widely policed in the media and on social media itself. Many people took to YouTube filming videos in response to the trend to offer girls feedback—in other words, to demand “Where are the parents?” and paternalistically declare “You’re too young to be on YouTube,” challenging why the idea of asking the pretty or ugly question on YouTube would ever enter a girl’s mind. Overall media response to the trend reinforces how tween girls are viewed in the collective American imagination in dualistic terms. They are either portrayed as innocent, naive, and vulnerable to predators or as risky, irresponsible, and reckless if they are thought to be creating and sharing any kind of content that could be interpreted as provocative or sexual (Draper 2012; Hasinoff 2015; Thiel-Stern 2009).

Much of the cultural narrative of girls in danger online comes from White middle-class media and a history of sexual hysteria surrounding girls’ bodies (Brumberg 1997; Cassell and Cramer 2008; Driscoll 2002; Hasinoff 2015; Thiel-Stern 2014). The need to protect White, middle-class girls is an enduring cultural thrust that follows girls into whatever social and public spaces they occupy. Tween girls’ position on the line between childhood and adulthood is precarious and characterized by dominant, contradictory ideas of girlhood that position tween girls as both innocent/virginal and hypersexual/sexually threatening. Perceptions of “bad girls” and “at-risk” girls (Harris 2004a) can be mapped onto specific kinds of social media content girls are posting, including any kind of content construed as sexualized (revealing clothing, body exposure, suggestive body movements, etc.) or especially personal, revealing details about home life, friends, or school (Shields Dobson 2015). Tween girls must be careful in how they present themselves online, and they learn a great deal about how to be careful by internalizing the media-driven moral panic and adult-centered fears described here.

Parental Involvement: Internalizing Fear, Following Rules

Part of learning to post content on personal social media profiles is understanding the potential consequences and risks associated with posting. Tween girls are learning the social media terrain via participation and recognizing norms of online behavior among their age demographic. All twenty-six of the tween girls I interviewed indicated some form of communication with their parents or other trusted adults about social media use, with most telling me that their parents set limits on use, establish rules about what kinds of content they can post, and engage them in regular discussions about social media. An attribute I found salient in all this, though, is that the tween girls I talked with used fear-centered and safety-centered language when discussing how their parents play a part in mediating their social media participation. My findings suggest that parents, whether consciously or not, engage fear and danger as primary socializers in teaching girls about social media and the constructed gendered risks associated with it.

Jazz is particularly adamant about girls needing to protect themselves online. It is clear she has internalized a lot of the adult-centered fear that informs feelings about tween girls on social media. In our interview, this talkative and lively ten-year-old Black girl takes on an advisory role. She uses a second-person point of view when discussing safety on social media. Toward the middle of our interview, Jazz starts talking about how social media can be both a good and a bad thing. She appreciates that she can communicate with friends and family from far away, but she has a lot of misgivings and negative feelings about social media. I ask her to tell me about them.

JAZZ: I’m not sure how to say this.

KP: That’s okay. Take your time.

JAZZ: So, like if you wanted to text your friends and everything, somebody randomly could just like, text you, and then you would be like, “What is this?” You open the text and then maybe you see something bad. That’s when you know you have to delete it, but you can’t. How are you going to talk to your friends?

KP: Do you mean like a stranger could text you something bad?

JAZZ: Yeah, they could like, hack you or something. Like, get that information on you.

KP: Oh, okay. I see. Can you say more about what something bad might be?

JAZZ: Like, maybe curse words. Or like they say weird things or want to friend you or meet you or something. So that’s one of the problems with [social media].

KP: Has that ever happened to you?

JAZZ: No. But people my age, like, I think they should make sure that your mom, or like your parents, anybody who you live with, make sure that they are keeping an eye on what you’re doing, like what you’re listening to and what you are watching. Make sure that your parents are doing that, like, make sure they are keeping an eye on you because you need to be protected at all times, even if you are some girl, like cute and safe. It can never always be safe. It’s not always safe so you need to make sure that you’re in contact with your mom and everything. Make sure that your mom knows what you are doing so that you won’t end up with all these things happening. You need to make sure that your parents are always with you, and you are in contact with them.

Jazz mentions getting hacked and getting her information stolen by a potential stranger online. She expresses concern about not being able to communicate with her friends if her information gets used, which I interpret as fear of not being able to use her phone in the same way if a stranger tries to contact her. She sees the possibility of getting hacked as interrupting her ability to communicate with her friends.

Jazz uses that second-person point of view and describes a girl being “cute and safe” and “needing to be protected at all times.” She reiterates several times that young people need to make sure their parents are monitoring what they are doing online. Not only is the fear narrative internalized here, but it is notably gendered. She sees parents as playing a necessary role in ensuring the safety of young people, but she specifically emphasizes a girl who is “cute and safe,” conjuring images of young, White girls in news media stories who have been targets of sexual predation. This speaks to the moral panic associated with the archetype of the young, middle-class, White “future” girl who needs protecting (Banet-Weiser 2018; Cassell and Cramer 2008; Harris 2004a; Thiel-Stern 2014).

Language surrounding parental involvement and social media safety punctuates multiple interviews. Tessy and I watch the sample of Pretty or Ugly YouTube videos together, and part of our discussion afterward focuses on risks associated with the YouTube platform specifically. I ask Tessy, ten years old and White, if she would ever post a Pretty or Ugly video.

TESSY: Oh no. I won’t post a video [on YouTube] until I am, like, twenty.

KP: Until you’re twenty? Can you tell me why?

TESSY: Because, well, I’m not allowed to yet. Because I’m extremely young, and people could say, like, bad things to me, and it would hurt my feelings really badly. So, my dad wants to protect me and keep me safe for a while.

In a departure from the other girls I interviewed, who tended to set themselves apart from the Pretty or Ugly trend using “Girl Power!” rhetoric, Tessy instead reasons that she would not post a Pretty or Ugly video because of her age and the possibility of receiving comments that could harm her or hurt her feelings. As outlined in Chapter Four, various interviewees responded to Pretty or Ugly videos using these same ideas from protectionist discourse but still Othered the girls in the YouTube trend by suggesting that girls should not be making themselves available online in that way and that they would never post a video like that. Tessy does not necessarily separate herself from the trend in such staunch terms. In this instance, safety goes beyond predatory behavior and the impression that girls are targets for sexualization (Cassell and Cramer 2008; Sales 2016; APA 2008). Rather, Tessy’s dad wants to protect her from getting her feelings hurt, pointing to fears of social media as a space where cyberbullying and other forms of online harassment are a prevalent possibility. However, Tessy also continues to say,

I chuckle in response because Tessy presents this anecdote in an amusing and lighthearted way, but underneath that lightheartedness is an internalized fear of online stalkers, and more than that, a sense that this kind of predatory behavior could happen to her. She references her dad again and his role in protecting her from being stalked. Tessy evokes mass media and news media images of stalkers who use online information to find out where people are in physical space.

Similarly, Pepper, another ten-year-old White girl, talks to me about how her dad intervenes in her social media use to maintain her safety. She explains,

While Pepper’s dad does monitor her social media use to some degree, Pepper notably plays an active role in her own protection and privacy, blocking people she does not know and seeking support and assistance from a parent when she needs it.

One of the central aspects of the moral panic surrounding girls’ bodies is that a boundary between digital and physical space will be crossed. In other words, a fear of online predators is that predatory behavior will not remain online, that girls will be tricked or persuaded into meeting up with strangers offline. Tween girls do not internalize this fear necessarily or solely based on personal experiences of solicitations for sexually explicit content from strangers online. Of the twenty-six girls I interviewed, Pepper is the only one who indicates having been directly contacted by a stranger in a way that made her feel unsafe (i.e., it was “creepy”). Rather, these internalized fears are based on parental concerns and magnified by mass media coverage of sexual predators and stalkers targeting young girls via social media and pushed into a feedback loop. The girls I interviewed internalized the image of the creepy adult man, and that fear makes its way into how they structure online behavior and control information output.

Other girls reveal how their parents have made them delete social media accounts over concerns of safety and well-being. Michelle and I have our conversation after school on a chilly, fall day. A quiet, eleven-year-old Black girl, Michelle fiddles with her phone on the table while we talk about social media. She is on Snapchat and has a Twitter account. I inquire about Facebook and Instagram, and she tells me she’s not allowed to have an Instagram account yet.

KP: Why not?

MICHELLE: Well, I had an Instagram before. It was just when my mom found out, and then she made me get rid of it.

KP: Really? Did she tell you why she didn’t want you to have it?

MICHELLE: Because my mom said that she read on the news website that a little girl who was on Instagram, well, she was my age, and she was kind of snapping pictures. And she was in Chicago, and um, this guy was following her that she didn’t know, and random people can just follow you. So, he followed her. And then he tried to grab her and stuff, but everybody was watching and stuff, and the mom called the police and they got there and then they stopped him. So, my mom got kind of worried that I would start [Instagram], and like random people would start following me.

Here is a clear instance of adult-centered fears and moral panic directly influencing social media behaviors and practices for a tween girl. Michelle seems to conflate or at least not directly distinguish between the girl in the story being followed on social media and followed in physical space, further emphasizing the fear of predatory behavior crossing over from the digital to the physical. Michelle seems passive about her mom making her delete her Instagram account. She matter-of-factly shares with me how her mom saw the news story, catalyzing some alarm that a similar occurrence could happen to her daughter, and responded by prohibiting her from using Instagram. Based on what my interviewees told me, their parents communicate with them the potential dangers and risks associated with social media and predatory behavior, often by giving examples from news media. Tween girls’ use of language such as “stalkers,” “creepy,” “random people,” and “it can never always be safe” reveals how parents internalize these fears, socializing their children to approach social media with a level of wariness and caution.

“We Would Never See Sunlight”

Another prominent concern that adults have about social media is based on how much time young people spend online (boyd 2014; Marciano et al. 2022; Palfrey and Gasser 2016) and the possibilities of getting addicted to these platforms, engaging in too much social comparison, and being exposed to negative content. I asked the girls during each of our interviews how much time they spend online each day, and there was quite the spectrum of responses, ranging anywhere from twenty minutes to an hour to several hours a day. Only two of my interview respondents, Kendra and Brooklyn, both thirteen years old, indicated to me that they are online for many hours a day (over five hours). Breanna, an eleven-year-old, spends approximately twenty minutes online each day, and the other twenty-three girls in my sample spend one to three hours online each day, with most of that time dedicated to checking or scrolling social media feeds, sharing content such as snaps, stories, or photos, and engaging with other content such as YouTube videos.

The social media behavior of parents and other family members such as older siblings often acts as the primary entry point for tween girls’ learning how to use these platforms; knowing what kind of content they are allowed to look at, like, and post; and establishing limits on how often and for how long they are on social media daily (Berson, Berson, and Ferron 2002; Hiniker, Schoenebeck, and Kientz 2016; Kim and Davis 2017). Parents set limits on which platforms are allowed and which are not, along with how much time is reasonable to spend online each day. Parental involvement also involves enforcing boundaries on “too much screen time.” Some girls indicate that their parents give them set times of day (e.g., after school and before dinner) or a specified amount of time on social media each day. For example, Pepper, White and ten years old, tells me, “For the school week, my parents let me have one hour a day [online], and on weekends, I get two hours [a day].”

I did discover, however, that a decent majority of the girls I interviewed can use their phones or devices whenever they want, provided they are not “in trouble” and meet their responsibilities at school and at home. In this sense, tween girls are granted some freedom to use social media at their discretion, but they are required to demonstrate their ability to balance multiple responsibilities and be “good” girls (Burke, Adamic, and Marciniak 2021; Kim and Davis 2017; Weisskirch 2011). Starr, a twelve-year-old Black girl, tells me, “I get to use [my phone] whenever I want, as long as I get stuff cleaned, and then I’m good to have it.” Ricki, Black and eleven years old, similarly explains, “I can use [my phone] as much as I want if I get my homework done and read for thirty minutes.” I found that when girls do not have set limits on screen time, they often mimic parental behavior and establish limits for themselves in terms of signing off and “unplugging” from social media (Attia 2023; Doucleff 2023). Given my subject position as adult interviewer who did not grow up with social media, there may be some social desirability bias happening in girls’ responses, but it appears that parental modeling of social media behavior can translate to self-governance and tween girls’ ability to control limits of screen time for themselves.

Tween girls also mention adult-centered anxiety about Internet use and social media participation as potentially addicting or, at minimum, distracting. In my interview with Black thirteen-year-old Chrissy, she tells me her favorite things to do are play football and basketball and hang out with her friends.

CHRISSY: Oh, and texting people. I love to text with people. (laughs)

KP: Do you get to use your phone whenever you want to?

CHRISSY: Yes. But I don’t bring it to school. I can’t use it during the day, so what’s the point?

KP: Wow, that seems like it would be hard to do.

My own biases and assumptions sneak in; I assume young people would likely feel incomplete without their phone nearby, as though they could not live without it, which, at this point, would be not unlike a significant portion of adults in the United States, 47 percent of whom reportedly “could not live without their smartphones” (Saad 2022; Sbarra, Briskin, and Slatcher 2019). Chrissy goes on to explain how she sees that people at school who break the rules and use their phones during class get distracted more easily and lose sight of other things they need to do, like schoolwork. I ask her, “Do you think people your age use social media too much?” Chrissy considers my question for a moment and seems stuck on her answer. Finally, she says,

I was truthfully taken aback to find that girls did not complain to me about parents setting time limits for being online. When parents set limits, the girls appear to generally accept them without much argument (at least, that is what they tell me). My surprise feels connected to how young people have been positioned in news and popular media in essentialist terms, as a generation addicted to social media and unable to disconnect from their devices (Baron 2018; Edwards and Fox 2018; Johnson 2016; Sales 2016). Chrissy iterates this idea in her response by criticizing people’s inability to step away from their phones for a period of time and suggesting that, while social media use is appropriate for her age demographic, there needs to be balance in people “getting out more.” Her comment about sunlight evokes an image of a young person in a dark room, face lit up by their phone, eyes glued to the screen—an image regularly employed by news media stories about the perils of Internet addiction.

Whether the cause of moral panic is sexual predation, stalkers, strangers, or social media addiction, tween girls demonstrate internalized fears via parental socialization and mediation in social media participation. This internalization translates to how girls characterize the seriousness of staying safe on social media, setting boundaries, and following parental rules and guidelines. Parental involvement is a crucial part of how girls understand and associate potential danger and risk with social media use. Age of a tween girl also matters in further internalizing parental concerns and shapes ideas about what is appropriate versus inappropriate content to engage with or post.

The Age Line and Appropriate versus Inappropriate Content

The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) was passed in 1998 and went into effect in 2000. The purpose of the act is to protect identifying information online of children under the age of thirteen; social media sites including YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram, and Facebook must act in compliance with the law in not allowing users under thirteen years of age to set up accounts. For YouTube, tweens between the ages of thirteen and seventeen need permission to start their own channel. On TikTok, you must be sixteen years old to use any direct message feature (direct messaging is disabled for TikTok accounts whose owners are between thirteen and fifteen years old). That said, given that all my interviewees had at least two active social media accounts and most are younger than thirteen, there is little formal oversight into how social media platforms manage legislated age restrictions and usership.

New legislation was introduced by members of Congress in early 2024 to help combat concerns around the well-being of young people online. One bill is the bipartisan-proposed Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), which puts forth several requests requiring “online services like social media networks, video game sites and messaging apps to take ‘reasonable measures’ to prevent harm—including online bullying, harassment, sexual exploitation, anorexia, self-harm and predatory marketing—to minors who used their platforms” (Singer 2024:para. 2). There is a notable amount of bipartisan support around many of these bills in Congress. At the time of writing, legislation has not been passed, and civil liberties groups have been active in arguing against said legislation, citing issues with free speech and freedom of expression and concerns over what it might mean in the culture wars, including restricting information on reproductive rights, gender identity, and LGBTQ+ social justice issues (Perrino and King 2023).

Notably, tweens have not been a central part of the conversation because nearly all large-scale data on social media participation is limited to teenagers thirteen years old and older. Even with COPPA as federal law, lack of oversight renders making an account on a social media site as simple as putting in a false birthday or using the information of an older friend or family member to make a profile (Aiken 2016). Some of the younger girls I interviewed appealed to a parent or older sibling to help them set up an account using their information, while others simply indicated a different birth date when activating their accounts. Only one of the girls indicated having a parent use the thirteen-and-older policy to rationalize keeping their daughter offline. Ariel, an inquisitive ten-year-old White girl, tells me, “Most sites you need to be thirteen . . . [and] basically, [my mom] doesn’t want us to participate in, like, you-have-to-be-thirteen site things. I did that once and I got, like, really yelled at.” But Ariel does have accounts on Snapchat, Musical.ly, and YouTube, which she uses regularly. Parental knowledge or enforcement of the thirteen-and-older policy seems limited, as all the girls, regardless of age, had Snapchat, and several of my younger interviewees also had Musical.ly or Instagram accounts.

Perhaps part of this incongruity of allowing participation on some sites but not others is because these platforms, especially Snapchat and Musical.ly (which became part of TikTok in a merger in 2018), are characterized or understood as more appropriate for younger users than platforms like Facebook and Instagram, given their structure and the kinds of content people share. Facebook is widely considered of less interest for tween users, and Instagram is geared toward visually oriented content such as selfies that may be seen by a larger audience. Snapchat is arguably more intimate, as tween girls mainly snap friends and peers they know in physical space and have established relationships with. Musical.ly is described with levity: it is silly, fun, and playful to post and share videos of singing and dancing. Though Musical.ly merged with TikTok in 2018, the app was already established as more attractive to users under the legal age limit of thirteen (De Leyn et al. 2021; Herrman 2016).

Another consideration could be parents attempting to balance the desire to protect their children with the reality that social media is a normal aspect of tween life. And insofar as there are potential risks associated with participating on social media, there are also potential consequences of barring girls from being active on it, including impacting their connections with their peer communities and excluding them from important processes of social and emotional development through these interactions (Farrell 2022; Gordon 2019; Nesi, Mann, and Robb 2023; Anderson and Jiang 2018b).

Compiled data from studies on social media usership and age demographics indicate that there are quite literally millions of American girls under the age of thirteen with personal accounts on social media platforms (Canales 2022; Beilinson 2014; Thorn Report 2021). I found that tween girls, via the internalization of parental concerns and the language of appropriateness, have developed a values system of certain social media platforms being more appropriate than others. This values system is necessarily adjudicated by age.

During the interview process, an age line became apparent in multiple ways conceptually and practically dividing twelve- and thirteen-year-olds from ten- and eleven-year-olds. Twelve- and thirteen-year-olds have a pronounced sense of authority about their social media use and a self-proclaimed maturity that younger girls do not have. They generally agree that a ten- or eleven-year-old would not, or should not, need to use social media yet. Many of the older girls feel that social media use is more relevant for them overall. Noelle, the smart and sharp-witted thirteen-year-old Black girl who loves nail art, has a lot to say about younger girls being on social media. She explains,

Noelle feels that younger tweens should be focusing their attention on school rather than on social media use, but for girls her age (thirteen and older), social media use is assumed. She says, “Of course you have social media” when you get to be her age. Her reasoning suggests that older tween girls (thirteen and up) have had more time to mature, are able to balance their responsibilities of school and social life more effectively, and are more likely to have friends and peers who are also using these platforms once they reach that age, making it more appropriate for them to have social media accounts.

Meanwhile, the younger tween girls I talked with were more likely to express ideas about appropriate versus inappropriate content and spoke often about the role of parents in overseeing their social media use. The younger girls also appeared more likely to be influenced by how their parents use social media and set time limits for themselves on social media compared to the older girls (Kim and Davis 2017; Kroger 2007; Weisskirch 2011). This difference may occur because peer influence is not as strong for younger girls at this point in adolescent development, and they place more emphasis on modeling parent behavior rather than peer behavior (Brown, Clasen, and Eicher 1986; Steinberg and Monahan 2007). A twelve- or thirteen-year-old girl may also be more apt to experience gender-related pressures and expectations associated with body and beauty, which may drive more of her behavior on social media in terms of time spent online, kinds of content engaged with (both looked at and posted), and appearance-related social capital (Farrell 2022; Nilan et al. 2015; Vandenbosch and Eggermont 2012).

My interviewee Ariel, White and ten years old, draws distinct lines along which social media sites are appropriate for which ages. She feels strongly that platforms such as Facebook and Instagram are only appropriate for girls thirteen and older. She says, “I’m too young for that stuff. I don’t need it yet.” Interestingly, Ariel qualifies her lack of participation on these platforms using the same language as Noelle when she talks about how younger girls have no need for social media accounts. Ariel sees Facebook and Instagram as the province of older tweens and teens, but she does have accounts on Snapchat, Musical.ly, and YouTube. Other girls in the younger interviewee age bracket reinforce Ariel’s perspective. My interviewee Ricki, a White eleven-year-old, talks at length about how she uses Snapchat, but Instagram is not appropriate for her or people her age.

RICKI: A lot of people at my school are on [social media], I know that. Because they’re always talking about it at school, like all the sites they have that I don’t. I only have Snapchat and Musical.ly and stuff. And they have like, Instagram. I don’t have Instagram. But I don’t want it because my mom said it’s like Facebook, and Facebook is not appropriate.

KP: Why are Facebook and Instagram not appropriate?

RICKI: It’s for like fourteen-year-olds. Teens can do it. But none of my friends are teens and a lot of them still have it. But I don’t have it. It can be a bad thing. But it depends on how they use it, I guess. They can post very inappropriate pictures, or they can do good stuff.

KP: What would be an example of something good that someone posts on Instagram?

RICKI: Like, they can draw pictures or post pictures of their families, and they just want a lot of people to see it and get a lot of likes.

KP: Would you like to have an Instagram account in the future?

RICKI: Yeah, one day when I’m older. But I think it looks kind of boring. (laughs) It’s just people posting pictures. Right now, like, a couple of my friends wish they had it. But they got to, like . . . they got to earn it to have it.

KP: Can you share more about what you mean by “earn it”?

RICKI: Like you got to be good on social media. You got to show your mom that you are mature enough to have it.

“Earn it” is compelling word choice. Ricki’s statement about earning the opportunity to be on Instagram by being mature and demonstrating maturity to a parent aligns with the maturity Noelle articulates. This maturity firmly relates to the ability to stay safe on social media, only post certain kinds of content, keep information private, and deal with the possibility of being confronted with inappropriate content. Inappropriate content, in the purview of the girls I talk with, includes curse words, sexual imagery and language, and depictions of violence. These are the kinds of online content tween girls actively work to avoid.

Jazz, Black and ten years old, has stalwart ideas of what people her age should or should not be looking at or engaging with on social media. She discusses how she is not supposed to look at inappropriate content and references videos with curse words in them specifically as what she understands to be inappropriate. She is cautious about social media and relies heavily on parental involvement and oversight to feel safe online. She says, “It’s easy for you to find something that you’re not supposed to see, like, you say, ‘I know I’m not supposed to see that.’ And then you just delete it because you think it’s bad for you.” Jazz tells me that she runs everything by her mom before she posts it on social media. She adopts an “I know it when I see it” approach to inappropriate content, which seems to be mainly learned through parental influence and regular discussions with her mom about how to avoid, delete, or block content she should not see.

Tessy, White and ten years old, buttresses this theme of age-related risk negotiation and navigating what is appropriate on social media and what is not. She uses Instagram, Snapchat, and Musical.ly but does not use Facebook or Twitter. In our interview, she says, “Children should not be able to have a Twitter or Facebook, definitely not Facebook . . . [Because] there’s usually like inappropriate things on Facebook that children shouldn’t see.” Tessy and I talk about the differences between Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. She has a hard time articulating exactly what makes one platform more appropriate for her age group versus another, only that Facebook and Twitter are meant for adults and that Instagram is “okay, kind of.” This suggests to me that some tween girls are adopting the language of appropriate and inappropriate mainly from how their parents talk to them about social media, but they are not necessarily able to qualify or define what it means for themselves. Further research on how parents perceive tween girls’ social media participation is necessary to understand if and how dominant media narratives of social media as dangerous for girls influence how parents talk to their tween girls about it (Barry et al. 2017; Brito 2012; Coyne et al. 2017; De Leyn et al. 2021; Jeffery 2020; Savic, McCosker, and Geldens 2016; Shin, Huh, and Faber 2012).

In my interview with Dominique, a Black eleven-year-old, we talk a lot about what is appropriate for girls her age in terms of social media use. I ask her which social media sites she thinks are okay for people her age to use.

DOMINIQUE: Well, like Facebook, everyone wants it. Like all my friends and stuff, we want it. But it’s too inappropriate so I don’t like that people post inappropriate stuff.

KP: If you are comfortable with it, can you share an example of something that might be inappropriate for someone your age to see?

DOMINIQUE: My friend has [a Facebook account] and she was showing them and she saw something very inappropriate. It was like a picture of a boy and a girl, and it was very inappropriate. And that’s why I told her she should get off of it. [And] it really depends on who your friends are too.

KP: Can you tell me more about that?

DOMINIQUE: On Facebook. Like, yeah, I just think it’s inappropriate. I’m not allowed to have one because of the inappropriate stuff. Like, at first, I used to not understand why I can’t, but now it’s just like, okay, I can’t have one, so.

KP: Do you think you might want [a Facebook account] when you get a bit older?

DOMINIQUE: Yeah. Depending on who’s my friends. I don’t want like random people, like people I don’t know and stuff like that . . . [People] can probably like hack you down or something like that. And I think it’s unsafe. So, I don’t really want to be friends with anyone I don’t know because it’s very unsafe . . . [I’d] rather just be friends with my friends.

Dominique’s comment about strangers “hacking you down” conjures fears of how private or personal information can be lifted, stolen, and/or circulated in online spaces. She consistently uses the words inappropriate and unsafe but again has a somewhat difficult time defining or explaining what she means. She references an image she saw on a friend’s Facebook account of a boy and a girl, but even with gentle prompting, she does not go into more detail.

As both Tessy and Dominique demonstrate, tween girls assign a values system to different platforms based on what they have been taught is appropriate and inappropriate. Snapchat and Musical.ly are the most popular among all the girls, and most of my participants have accounts on both. Instagram use tends to be more delineated by age, with most twelve- and thirteen-year-olds indicating they have accounts on the platform and most of the younger girls not using it, whether by choice or because they are not allowed to due to parents’ views on it being inappropriate. Facebook is viewed by the younger girls as inappropriate, so there is more caution exercised toward this platform, and while some of the younger girls may have a desire to have an account on Facebook, they also generally accept that they are too young.

The older tween girls have Facebook accounts but have less desire to use Facebook primarily because they view it as generating drama or as an outdated form of social media meant for adults. Recent survey data backs this up, suggesting interest in Facebook among Gen Zers has fallen drastically in the last decade (Vogels and Gelles-Watnick 2023; Vogels, Gelles-Watnick, and Massarat 2022). Noelle, Black and thirteen years old, refers to Facebook during our interview as “social media for old people,” to which I cannot help but laugh. The popularity of platforms shifts and evolves over time. In the early 2000s, Myspace was among the most popular social media sites, and it is now essentially obsolete. Facebook remains popular with American adults, but it is viewed by younger tweens and teens as one of the least desirable social media platforms in terms of routine participation, dropping from a 71 percent usage rate in 2014/2015 to a reported 32 percent usage rate among surveyed thirteen- to seventeen-year-olds (Vogels and Gelles-Watnick 2023). Aggregate data for the tween age category for social media use across platforms remains elusive.

In various ways, age mediates and facilitates social media experiences for tween girls, connecting with how tween girls internalize parental concerns, as well as what parents teach their children directly about identifying appropriate versus inappropriate content and which platforms are acceptable for girls to use. Younger tween girls are more apt to follow parental guidelines and articulate strong feelings about certain social media platforms being more inappropriate than others, while older tween girls embody and emphasize maturity and an understanding that social media participation is more important and expected for people their age. Girls learn how to use social media from parents, other family members, and peers, but they further their knowledge through participation as they navigate risks associated with visibility, prioritize privacy, and maintain personal safety and boundaries in digital space.

Prioritizing Privacy

Scout is a huge personality in a small package. This ten-year-old White girl is one of my most enthusiastic interview participants. When I arrive at the after-school site on a late October day and greet the group of girls sitting down for a snack, Scout immediately pushes back from the table and demands to be the first interview of the day. Among the twenty-six girls I interview, Scout stands out as exceptionally spirited and remarkably self-aware. She eagerly informs me of a variety of things in quick succession. She just got her own phone; she loves playing games online, going to her grandmother’s house, and Snapchatting with family and friends from her class. Her demeanor changes when I bring up Facebook. While Scout is very comfortable using Snapchat, she is wary of other social media sites, Facebook among them. She tells me a story about how her sister, a twelve-year-old, posted an image of Scout on Facebook when she was younger. Scout articulates some anger and frustration about this.

SCOUT: She needs my permission to do that.

KP: Can you tell me why it made you angry that she did that?

SCOUT: [Facebook] can be bad because there isn’t very much privacy.

KP: Does that bother you?

SCOUT: I think it can be a bad thing. You can go on [social media] and people can look at you, and maybe they know you from school. You might do something bad on it. And they could judge you for it.

KP: Can you tell me what something bad might be?

SCOUT: Like, if you make a singing video and they’ve never heard you singing, they could think it’s really weird. They could call you names and stuff like that.

KP: Oh, I see. Do you think that happens a lot on social media?

SCOUT: Yeah, it can. So like, you know the videos you showed me?

KP: The Pretty or Ugly videos?

SCOUT: Yes. Those girls, it’s just, maybe they think they are pretty enough to do that. And they are, they are. I’m not saying they’re ugly. But they can get judged, you know? People can say mean things about them.

KP: You don’t like that about social media? That people can be mean to other people?

SCOUT: I just don’t think it’s necessary, to like, post your face on like Instagram where everybody in the world can see it . . . [I] like to keep my face to my family and my friends.

My interview findings track with recent scholarship exploring perceptions of privacy among tweens and the importance of privacy while engaging in self-representation practices on social media (Balleys and Coll 2017; Davis and Carrie 2013; De Leyn et al. 2019; De Leyn et al. 2021; Jeffery 2020). How young people interact in the creation and navigation of digitally networked publics catalyzes concern, especially from parents and adult stakeholders, who may presume reckless online behavior among youth, particularly around disclosing personal information (boyd 2007; De Leyn et al. 2019; De Leyn et al. 2021; De Wolf and Joye 2019; Marwick 2008). Parental concern itself signals an ongoing preoccupation with girls’ bodies, appearances, and digital socialization, none of which exist in a social media vacuum or separate from historical meaning and political systems. Principles of protectionism, which have over time constructed ideas about tween girls’ bodies in this liminal space between childhood and adulthood, are deeply entrenched in centuries-old, cis-heteronormatively structured familial instinct (especially on the part of fathers) to protect girl children from boys and men.

Throughout our conversation, Scout prioritizes privacy on social media and makes values-based statements about posting pictures and videos to public sites. Yet rather than emphasizing disquiet about sexual predators and strangers online, as tend to be of central concern to adults, Scout seems much more attuned to how people at school might be able to look at what she posts and judge or make fun of her based on that content, which speaks to some of the aforementioned pressures girls feel about making themselves visible in certain ways (Banet-Weiser 2014; Butkowski et al. 2020; Elias and Gill 2018; Fardouly, Willburger, and Vartanian 2018; Shields Dobson 2015; Yau and Reich 2019). Her experiences with peers at school have the potential to cross the line into digital space. She feels a sense of insecurity about posting something “bad” or “weird” on social media and how it could incite negative responses, notably from people she knows (Gill 2021). Scout’s concern translates into how she maintains her online presence; she keeps her content private, only sharing posts with friends and family and most commonly using Snapchat to communicate with a close circle of friends. She does not like more public sites such as Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. As she says, she likes to keep her face to her family and friends, and she is bothered that her sister posted an image of her without her permission. Scout’s feelings about social media and visibility suggest she has a strong sense of bodily autonomy, as she purposefully keeps her social media activity more private.

I had discussions with all my interviewees about privacy and staying safe online. Girls brought it up on their own in our conversations, framing it as simply part of what they must do as they participate on social media and produce digital girlhoods. Their actual practices of maintaining privacy and protecting themselves are filtered through internalized fears of what could happen to them in online space and through the role parents play in mediating and overseeing social media use. This everyday self-surveillance and prioritizing of privacy are reified by the line of what is considered age appropriate in terms of specific apps and content, as referenced in the previous section of this chapter. As De Leyn et al. note in their research on tween and parent perceptions of privacy on TikTok,

Pepper, ten years old and White, is very clear about keeping her accounts private. She explains,

Pepper is diligent about who she accepts as a friend or follower, and she keeps her social media circle tight, restricting it mainly to friends and family members she knows in physical space.

Noelle, Black and thirteen years old, is also judicious with how she approaches friend and follower requests. During our interview, I ask Noelle about how she decides whether to accept a friend request.

NOELLE: Well, my accounts are private. Nobody can even see my Snapchat story unless I follow them or add them. But if they don’t have Snapchat, they can’t see my story unless I actually show it to them on my phone.

KP: Can you tell me more about what your Snapchat story is?

NOELLE: It’s just stuff about my day. And when I put stuff on my story, like, the people that follow me can see it. It’s like what I do on Instagram too. I post pictures of myself, and I post pictures about my family, and what I’m all about and what I do in life. That’s what I post on my page.

As we talk more about privacy on social media, Noelle also indicates, “I have my accounts on private because whenever anybody requests to follow me, first I look through their page to see if they’re appropriate for me or if there is anything I don’t like. And if they’re fine, I’ll just accept it.” For Noelle, part of how she thinks about risk online and protects herself is about determining what content is appropriate for her to see and engage with.

Alarm about strangers makes its way into the processes of girls managing the privacy and publicity of their social media accounts. I talk to Jessie, Black and twelve years old, about whether her accounts are public or private and with whom she tends to interact on these platforms.

JESSIE: Instagram is a mixture of [strangers and people I know], but I don’t have any strangers on Snapchat. I had strangers on Snapchat, but then one of them texted me somehow and I got scared so I blocked them, and then I never added any strangers as a friend, and I never added any strangers back if they tried to follow me.

KP: Wow. So is Instagram different from Snapchat like, in terms of adding people or following people you don’t know?

JESSIE: Part of it is just about what you post. Like I post silly or weird stuff on Snapchat to my friends. I just post a lot of pictures on Instagram. But I don’t just make mine public. Mine aren’t just like, all public [for anyone to see]. I don’t want like, random people that I don’t know just like, looking at it. If you think about it, it could be a grown man and then I’ll just get creeped out.

The figure of the creepy, strange man informs how Jessie thinks about and manages privacy and publicity on various social media platforms. And for Jessie, it matters what the content is and the platform in question. Snapchat is about communicating with friends she knows. Instagram is a mixture of people she knows and strangers who follow her, but she keeps the account private in the sense that followers need to be approved by her first. Jessie is the interviewee who has a YouTube channel dedicated to dance and choreography. Her YouTube channel is public, and strategically so, because she wants to be seen and noticed for her dancing. By making her YouTube channel public, Jessie knowingly increases her chances of gaining likes, followers, and subscribers—as well as trolls. She manages the risks associated with visibility, balancing the desire to be seen by making her YouTube account public and dedicating it to her passion and interest in dance while keeping her other social media accounts largely private. Bulger et al. speak to this balance in the Missing Middle report, suggesting,

Except in the handful of cases where girls are trying to showcase their interests and increase their social capital via public content on YouTube, such as Jessie, or having fun making dances on Musical.ly, like Brooklyn, my data shows that girls are not blindly accepting followers or friend requests from people they do not know. They are either A) only interacting on social media platforms with people they know in real life and blocking or deleting requests from people they do not know, or B) closely inspecting the social media content of the person who requested to follow or friend them before hitting the accept button. The girls I interviewed adapt several different online privacy rules and, as I mention in the previous chapter, create in-group strategies among online friend groups to maintain and strengthen friendship connections. While they certainly emphasize a desire to be safe, they also emphasize a desire to have fun, wanting their friends to see their content and strategically controlling how, where, and with whom they share their digital girlhoods.

Conclusions: Signing on and Staying Safe

In my interview with Maya, an eleven-year-old Latina girl, it is brought home how the cultural model of innocent girls in need of protection runs deep in individual tween girls’ narratives of self-representation. She tells me, “Girls already know that you got, well, that they need to be protected about their self, and about sharing their photos online.” Tween girls are indoctrinated with adult-centered fears of social media, which are often driven by dominant media narratives and characterized by parents’ desire to protect their children, whether from online predators, cyberbullying, or social media addiction. As I argue in this chapter, however, tween girls primarily keep their content private, interact online with people they know, follow parental guidelines, model parental behavior on social media, and importantly, internalize what their parents teach them in terms of approaching social media with a certain level of fear and caution, as well as recognizing and articulating what is considered age appropriate content.

The onus is placed on girls to adjust their behavior and, as demonstrated, to approach social media with fear and caution, which may concurrently work to protect tween girls and constrict and dampen their self-expressions, embodied online behaviors, political actions, and creation of digital girlhoods. Societally speaking, we have conditioned girls to police themselves and their behavior rather than having the culture at large confront social ills that have continually functioned to normalize male aggression and societal derision toward young girls.

Moral panic often comes from misunderstanding, in addition to highly sensationalized, trumped-up versions of sexually predatory and cyberbullying stories proliferated by the media. However, when adult authorities and youth have conversations and are open about these dialogues, building a level of trust with one another, social media may not need to incite such fear among adults. As danah boyd suggests,

Cassell and Cramer similarly argue,

I do not to suggest that there is no risk associated with tween girls producing digital girlhoods and making themselves visible on social media, but for as many reasons as there are to worry, there are reasons not to. Even in cases of high incidence of daily use, the nature of the content a tween girl is engaging in, as well as how much time she spends self-monitoring, matters in determining negative impacts (Markey and Daniels 2022; Salomon 2017), and most girls are not using social media to an extreme degree in terms of amount of daily use (Nesi, Mann, and Robb 2023; Vogels and Gelles-Watnick 2023).

Recent findings demonstrate that the majority of young people feel social media has either a positive or neutral effect on their lives (Anderson et al. 2022; Anderson and Jiang 2018a; Nesi, Mann, and Robb 2023; Vogels, Gelles-Watnick, and Massarat 2022) and that they use social media for multiple reasons, including connecting with community, finding social support, engaging politically, sharing interests, and developing themselves and their social networks (boyd and Ellison 2007; boyd 2014; Cassell and Cramer 2008; Gordon 2019; Lenhart et al. 2015; Preston-Sidler 2015). As Farrell writes in her work on teenage girls, social media, and identity development, “these platforms have become socially vital for teenage girls providing an ecosystem for dynamic peer communications, a space to connect, building relationship, plan social gatherings and construct and affirm their identities (Metcalfe and Llewellyn 2020; Ringrose et al. 2013)” (2022:1).

While public, news, and popular media often present stories of girls putting themselves at risk online and the sometimes dire consequences, rarely do we hear stories about how tween girls are using social media to connect, express themselves, engage in their interests, support other girls, and create social change. But those stories are there, and they are worth telling.