This week we’re looking young people’s perceptions of social media. What are their views about the potentially harmful content that they’re seeing online? What would they like to be done about it? And what are some of the challenges facing researchers who want to look at how algorithms push different types of content?
News headlines are increasingly dominated by concerns about the harms young people face online. In late 2025, Australia introduced a ban preventing under-16s from accessing a range of major social media platforms. Here in the UK, Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch has publicly backed a similar approach, and at the time of recording there is widespread speculation that the UK government may be preparing to follow suit - perhaps even by the time you’re listening to this episode.
But how do young people themselves experience the online spaces they inhabit? Do they see digital content as harmful, empowering, or something more complex? And crucially, what do they think should be done to make the online world safer and more constructive?
In this episode, we explore these questions with Dr Emma Connolly, Research Fellow in the UCL Department of Political Science and a member of UCL’s Digital Speech Lab, where she leads research on digital civic education.
Mentioned in this episode:
[00:00:05] Alan Renwick: Hello, this is UCL Uncovering Politics, and this week we are looking at young people's perceptions of social media. What are their views about potentially harmful content that they're seeing online and what would they like to be done about it?
Hello, my name is Alan Renwick and welcome to UCL Uncovering Politics, the podcast of the School of Public Policy and Department of Political Science at University College London.
The news headlines are currently filled with concerns that people are being exposed to harm online. Australia banned under sixteens from a range of big social media platforms towards the end of 2025. Here in the UK, Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch has endorsed the same approach. And at the time we're recording this episode, there is much speculation that the UK government is about to go down that path too.
Indeed, perhaps it will already have done so by the time you're listening to this, but what do we know about how young people themselves perceive the content that they're exposed to and what do they think should be done about it? Well, these vital questions are being explored by my brilliant colleague here in the UCL Department of Political Science, Dr. Emma Connolly, who is Research Fellow in UCL's Digital Speech Lab, leading its work on digital civic education. And I'm delighted that Emma joins me now.
Emma, welcome to UCL Uncovering Politics. It is great to have you on. And there are various strands to your work that hopefully we're going to have time to talk about today. And so you've just done, uh, some work, for example, looking at how information goes viral online. But let's focus at least first of all, on your research, examining young people's own perceptions of online content. Maybe it would be useful first just to say, what's the basic question that you're asking, that's driving your research?
[00:02:04] Emma Connolly: Thank you. Well, I think the key thing really is that there's a lot of literature that exists on the state of young people accessing harmful content on social media. We can't deny that it is happening, that's a given. We only need to look at other countries, like you've mentioned with Australia, where the concern has got to such a point that it has felt necessary to put in a ban.
But within all this literature, the one thing that perhaps isn't quite so obvious is what do young people encounter online day to day? What platforms do they use? What kind of harmful content are they accessing? Are they able to understand harmful content or content generated by AI, for example, from more organic forms of content?
What do they do, for example, when they recognise something is harmful? If they do something, if they do something like report it, is anything done? Is there a sense that some platforms are doing better than others? So there's all these questions that aren't necessarily pertaining to an angle from like a social media platform or an institutional organisation.
But we really wanted to get to the heart of how do young people experience harmful content on a day-to-day basis? And why does that.
[00:03:16] Alan Renwick: And you're looking at these questions by actually going into schools and you, you're actually running workshops in schools at the moment, is that right? Do you want to tell us a little bit about, uh, what, what are these workshops doing? What's the, what's the purpose of the workshops and, and, and yeah, just how is that going?
[00:03:29] Emma Connolly: Yes. So one of the initiatives from the Digital Speech Lab is the digital civic education strand. Obviously I'm here today by myself, but this would not be possible without our research assistants. We've got six who are working on the project. They're fantastic. They're the ones that are largely going into schools and delivering these workshops.
They are undergraduate students here at UCL. They are either doing Politics, PPE, or PIR. So they've got different backgrounds, but they all have kind of a shared interest in what do we do about harmful content on social media, but also how can it be used positively to engage young people in politics?
We know that the younger demographic are generally disenfranchised by political institutions in the UK. They are the demographic that has the lowest turnout in terms of, in terms of voting. So, these workshops that we run in local schools are designed to kind of assess the ways in which young people are encountering harmful content, giving them the tools to be able to kind of empower them to use social media, perhaps in a more critical or reflective way.
Um, but also to explore ways in which social media platforms or digital media can be used to engage the younger generation in, in politics. So, like I said, we work with local schools. We generally do what we call digital civic curriculum, which is built around eight sessions. Uh, those sessions are designed to cover anything from social media algorithms, how they work to try and make them a bit more transparent from what we know about them anyway.
They deal with, uh, different types of harmful content: AI, DeepFakes, spread of mis- and disinformation in different global contexts. We look at platform governance, what are platforms currently required to to do and what do they do? And we look at forms of engaging politically online. Disagreeing Well, which is already a UCL initiative and Using Platforms for Political Good.
[00:05:36] Alan Renwick: Fantastic. So if I understand correctly, these workshops are partly about you doing research, but they're also partly about kind of delivering a teaching program or a program enabling young people to learn and and reflect on their experiences. So it's kind of two purposes.
[00:05:51] Emma Connolly: Yep, that's exactly that. It's kind of dual strand. One of them is our curriculum. We call it teaching, but it's kind of more discussion based, more kind of exploratory, interactive workshops with students. And then on the other side of that, we have focus groups. We've got groups of around eight students in each. And we use that time, discussion time to talk to these young people about their experiences online. So absolutely correct. It's a, it's dual strand.
[00:06:19] Alan Renwick: And I'm intrigued that you're doing this with UCL undergraduate students. How does that go? I mean, potentially some people might think this sounds like a kind of high risk thing to have undergraduate students going into schools delivering, you know, it's quite sensitive content on, on, on subjects that, you know, some people might have some really bad experiences that get surfaced in the course of, of these workshops.
[00:06:38] Emma Connolly: Yeah, you are absolutely right and I think we can't really shy away from some of the sensitive content and, and. Yeah, sometimes difficult experiences that that young people may, may have had with, with online content. In reality, the logistics depend on the school. We make contact and we have a, a gatekeeping lead for each school.
We prep the content, they check the content, and perhaps identify any, any parts of that, but that might need to be treated a bit more sensitively. You know, and, and you are right about the undergraduate students, but I think what was really important for us was that kind of peer-to-peer model. We are talking about experiences of young people, so it seemed maybe disingenuous to have, you know, someone who was perhaps 20 years older going in and having shared experiences that aren't really shared at all because social media has moved on so much since, well, in, in the space of five years and it continues to do so. So, we felt that it was really, really important that the workshops were facilitated by a, as much as possible people who were of a similar age.
[00:07:48] Alan Renwick: Yeah. That's really interesting. It makes complete sense in terms of, uh, ensuring that you do manage to get a meaningful conversation.
So let's turn to what kinds of things you're getting from these conversations, what you're finding out. I mean, I guess the, the first question might just be what are you finding out in terms of young people's perceptions of the content that they are being exposed to and the harmful nature of some of that content?
[00:08:12] Emma Connolly: Yeah, I mean there's, there's a lot of really interesting stuff. We're still, we are still in the process of a) delivering the sessions and also doing the focus groups. So, but just to flag a couple of things that are really, really interesting, I, I think it's not a surprise to say that young people feel that platforms aren't doing enough to protect them from, from some of the content that they're seeing.
And I'll, I can touch more on that in, in a moment. I think there's also a pragmatic and, uh, kind of a pragmatic, uh, view that young people recognise that the speed in which content online travels that it's really tricky to, to address. And I think there's a sense that often what platforms do are too reactive, um, and therefore too late, the, the moment's gone, content has already been adapted or shared or turned into a different form, and I think there is a sense that it's almost likely, you know, a, a losing battle.
One of the things that, one of the really interesting things that kind of surfaced in from a school that we went to before Christmas was the idea of coded language and the way that young people, uh, use coded language like very legitimately, not in, not in, you know, specifically harmful context to communicate and as a, as a, as a platform, in terms of moderating, how do you moderate the use of emojis, for example, uh, how do you moderate the use of certain symbols to stand in for certain ideas or certain views?
And I think that is the reality of, of, of the way that people communicate online. If we think about, I mean, we all talked about Adolescence when it came out on Netflix six months ago, and that was a really good example of the way that emojis and symbols were being used to communicate different ideas and different values. And the problems with that, it's, as a, as an adult, how do you keep up with the vernaculars that, that young people are using? And therefore, how do you, how can you better educate with, you know, when you're constantly trying to kind of keep up with the, the latest kind of wave of communication?
But that also raises an issue for platforms, you know, if they're using AI, for example, to identify certain patterns, well, what do you do when suddenly something else is used in a place. And I think when we say, well, platforms just aren't doing enough. Of course there's lots that they could be doing, but there are also difficulties when things are evolving so quickly.
[00:10:51] Alan Renwick: Yeah. So young people are thinking that there are problems and they want action to be taken in order to address those problems, but they also see that there are real difficulties in tech tackling these problems.
And it's interesting what you say there about just the way in which language changes so very quickly and the way in which people are using nonverbal forms of language. And how quickly that changes and therefore, yeah. How can school curricula keep up with that? How can, uh, regulators keep up with that? How can the platforms themselves keep up with that in order to be able to intervene effectively?
Just before we get a bit deeper into questions of what young people perhaps think might work and what, whether they have ideas on, on kind of potential solutions. What, what are the, what's the nature of the harms that they're talking about in these discussions?
I guess you get a lot of concern about misinformation and disinformation online, and the ways in which that might harm people's ability to engage politically, but also just how, how mis- and disinformation might, might affect people's decisions in their own private lives as well. You also get a lot of concern clearly about abusive behavior, of bullying behavior, and how that can have deeply harmful effects. You get concern about, not so much, I guess, the content of material, but just the kind of volume of material and the addictive nature of that material and the ways in which that can, you know, people end up just endlessly scrolling. And the effects that that can have upon people's brains and their capacity to sleep, their capacity to socialise the, uh, you know, in so many different ways.
But I guess, you know, all of that is sort of older people's perceptions, I guess, of, of these sorts of problems. Do you get a different kind of feel of when you're speaking with young people or do the same sorts of issues come up?
[00:12:34] Emma Connolly: I mean, absolutely the same issues. I think you kind of spoke about content feeling overwhelming and it's not, you are absolutely right to kind of think about. It's not necessarily specific forms of harmful content, although they are encountering that. It's the mechanisms and the infrastructures through which that content is also being delivered. For example, we talked to some people about the, the constant scrolling which, which you've just mentioned.
Now platforms are designed to keep users on there for as long as possible. It it to monetise it, the attention economy, and that makes users really tired and less likely to also be able to engage critically with the, with the content that, that they're seeing. In the, in the literature talks, algorithm is described as having an anesthetic effect, the connotations of that kind of numbing the brain. You are, you are kind of no longer able to perhaps think critically or reflectively about what you're seeing, and that's a, that's, that's a real problem. But given the way that it is kind of built into the platform infrastructure and actively designed to maintain users' attention, how do you tackle that?
It's not just about making sure that the content that young people are seeing is isn't harmful, but it's also about how do you address the mechanisms and infrastructures, um, through which they engage with that content as well.
[00:13:56] Alan Renwick: And you're talking there specifically about TikTok. Um, are, are there differences between different platforms and do young people perceive differences?
[00:14:03] Emma Connolly: Yeah. This is something that I'm really interested in exploring further, actually from the research we've done so far, tikTok has definitely been mentioned as a platform that is, uh, kind of becoming more worrying, the blending of, uh, political content or harmful content or both repackaged in entertaining forms kind of creates this more insidious kind of creep of, of harm.
Some of our colleagues in the Digital Speech Lab are looking at the concept of cumulative harm. So again, we kind of get into this position where we are not just looking about individual posts or individual instances of what we might consider harmful content. What do you do when on its own it might not meet a threshold for being considered harmful, but when that accumulates over time or when you see that same kind of message being delivered maybe through different platforms or in different ways, then that creates another problem in in itself.
And I think even though the kind of echo chamber narrative on social media is starting to get some pushback in literature. That's not what we hear from young people. They are still saying, actually, once I've looked at this, I am flooded with, I'm like, bombarded with the same type of of content. So that's something that we would definitely like to look at in a little bit more detail.
[00:15:27] Alan Renwick: Really interesting. And all of this leads obviously to the question of what can you do about it? So, so you, you've indicated young people do want something to be done about this, so it's not like they, they want to be living in a kind of libertarian context in which anything goes and they're able to do anything and the, and therefore others are able to do anything to them. They do want this space to be regulated, uh, in some way. Did we get a sense from the conversations that have been happening about what they think would work and what they think would be feasible?
[00:16:03] Emma Connolly: I think there's definitely a sense of what's currently there that doesn't work. We spoke to some young people about labelling, whether that, whether that really works. And actually we had some really interesting conversations about the fact that not in all cases, and I don't wanna generalise to to to everybody, but certainly some young people were saying, well, actually that kinda makes me curious. Like some labels would, would make me not look, but actually some would.
[00:16:27] Alan Renwick: So we should just be clear on what we mean by labelling here. So this, this means when a, a post that is, that contains misinformation or is thought to contain misinformation is labeled as such. Is, is, is that the kind of thing that we have in mind here?
[00:16:38] Emma Connolly: Or it could be, yeah, or it could be this contains like graphic image or kind of sensitive content. It's a way of, a form of regulation, which means the content isn't removed or taken down from the platform, but is it is labeled.
[00:16:53] Alan Renwick: So you've indicated though that young people are often seeing the problems that would be associated with any attempts to tackle these issues. What exactly are the kinds of barriers that they perceive?
[00:17:07] Emma Connolly: Yeah. I just wanted to talk a little bit about transparency. Obviously it's a word that we kind of talk a, we use a lot when we talk about social media algorithms or, or, or the way that content is, is circulated. Some young people noted that forms of like AI generated content and platforms such as TikTok are taking over of substitutions for Google.
So you, you wouldn't go and Google something, you would go onto to TikTok or, or, or somewhere else in order to search that information. So this raises questions about like the transparency of information. And I'm gonna mention TikTok again because, uh, uh, but this is unique to the platform, but the, their algorithm is kind of infamously opaque.
So there's a kind of a real issue, and this is something that I'm exploring in my research as well. About how can we a) fully investigate empirically how content spreads and how people are, are accessing it and encountering it if we ourselves are not a hundred percent sure of how those algorithms work.
Related to that is the idea of what, what are credible information sources now and if, and young people certainly are aware that they are being fed a lot of content that is biased at best and untrue, completely untrue. It worse, but where's the baseline? Like where do, where can you go? And one of the things that was raised was the idea that, you know, seemingly more credible, news sources are often behind paywalls, whereas other forms of content isn't.
So there's unease of access. There's potentially an inequality of access between who is getting information, what kind of information are different groups of people getting and in what form. So there's been kind of lots of talk about me, a digital divide, but I, I think we're kind of seeing a bit of an information divide. You know, the kind of information is so decentralised and fragmented. It's really difficult to kind of decipher the exact mechanism through which people are encountering it.
[00:19:06] Alan Renwick: It's interesting when I, when I, when I hear that concern about the best quality information being behind paywall, my elderly brain immediately think, oh, what about the BBC? There's lots of BBC content that is free for anyone to access. Is that just way out of the scope of thinking of a lot of these young people? Is is the BBC just kind of not relevant?
[00:19:29] Emma Connolly: Yeah, I don't think, the BBC hasn't actually cropped up in, in any of the, um, been specifically mentioned as a, as a news source.
[00:19:35] Alan Renwick: It's maybe quite telling that the BBC doesn't get, uh, get, get mentioned. That that may maybe, I mean, I don't know the nature of the exactly these conversations that you're having, but, you know, maybe that is, is a symptom of, of the BBC not being present in people's information environments.
[00:19:48] Emma Connolly: Yeah, I, I think the BBC's probably always been perceived as quite a centralised source of information. And I think obviously we've definitely seen a, a shift. I think, and I read a stat the other day that, um, on average people use up to seven different web platforms a day. Um, and if you can think about you are receiving lots of different information from, from those different sources, obviously we've definitely seen a shift to, to a more decentralised information environment.
And, and that's not necessarily a bad thing, but certainly, like, it increases the challenges in the ideas that we've talked about, transparency, verification, you know, how can you weigh up one against the other? Like what is the criteria for deciding whether one seems to be more credible? And, and you've, you've kind of got this, and going back to our point earlier about actually content being quite overwhelming, those are lots of, perhaps subconscious, but there's a lots of decisions that young people are having to make in a very short space of time.
So you can see quite quickly, I mean, this is something that, that's, that some of these young people have said that it just makes them really tired and and less likely to engage in a way that they want to engage with, with information that they're receiving.
[00:20:58] Alan Renwick: There's one purported solution to these problems that is very high in the news agenda at the moment that I mentioned in the introduction to the episode, which is the idea that we just ban people aged under 16 from social media entirely. From the various bits of research that you have been doing, do you think that would be a good idea? Do you think it would work?
[00:21:19] Emma Connolly: I mean, at the moment, to be honest, I think I could be persuaded either way. I think if I had to come down on one side, I can't see how it's gonna solve the problems that, that we're seeing.
It, it delays the inevitable. With a caveat, obviously, we, we don't have a precedent for, obviously we're now a month into the ban in Australia and perhaps, you know, perhaps we are gonna start getting some information about the positive effects of that, how that's working, you know, the, the challenges in, in enforcing it. And I think those things are going to become clearer.
I would say that, you know, what happens when those young people get to sixteen? The environment hasn't changed. They haven't necessarily been using it, but the environment is, is is still there, and are we almost disadvantaging young people in that way by not equipping them with the skills and kind of tools that they need to be able to access and explore that online content once that, once they get to 16.
I think the other side of that as well is, you know, we hear a lot of negativity and rightly so. There's a lot of negative consequences from from, from using social media, but I think we shouldn't overlook the positives, especially in terms of political engagement.
Young people are generally relatively disenfranchised with politics in the UK. We've now got potential votes at 16 where, you know, politicians are going to want to be trying to engage young people in, in politics and by, kind of, writing off social media, um, I think that's, and getting rid of, of a channel that could be well used for, for positive.
[00:23:08] Alan Renwick: Yeah, really interesting. So. It sounds like you're definite that banning under-sixteens from social media definitely wouldn't be the, the whole solution in itself because the same problems that we see would just arise past the age of 16. And indeed, you know, a lot of these, these, these problems are problems that adults face as well. It is not somehow that people, uh, reach adulthood and some such, suddenly these problems disappear.
[00:23:32] Emma Connolly: And, and, and I think, you know, when you think about kind of the day-to-day content that young people might encounter it in school around kind of eating disorders or, or kind of self harm and all of those things. I mean, removing that, but you know, that's obviously, that's obviously a real positive. And if young people aren't accessing that kind of content, then the ban is doing its job in that sense.
I think it's the longer term kind of consequences and the longer term implications of not having those perhaps kind of open conversations. I mean, when we go into schools and we talk to young people, we ask them about their experiences and they talk about kind of the things that they've seen and it is more of a discussion and, and I feel like the moment for that is, is lost if young people aren't using those things, using those tools and, and that kind of makes it really difficult then to educate or to have this open, transparent conversations that we wanna have about the use of social media.
[00:24:28] Alan Renwick: Yeah. Okay. Very clear. One final question. So you've been talking about, mainly about research that you're doing with young people, understanding their perceptions of these issues. Um, do you wanna say a little bit bit about how that kinda fits into your wider research agenda? What future questions this is raising for you that you want also to explore?
[00:24:46] Emma Connolly: Yeah, so more broadly, my research kind of looks more like at the empirical mapping of viral content on social media platforms. So working on lots of different platforms, uh, TikTok X, Instagram, I'm looking at some kind of discourse on Reddit as well. So really focusing on like the empirical spread of content.
Now, that is, again, kind of like a dual pronged research agenda. So on one hand, looking at how those kind of viral mechanics facilitate the spread of harmful content as we've just discussed, but also how that might be leveraged, um, for more cognitive forms of political engagement as well.
So. I think one of the key things that I really wanna explore further is how does all this information that we're starting to get about how content circulates and is transmitted and remixed and repackaged on social media, what does that mean for how we can respond to it? What platforms should be doing about, about regulating it? And, and I think one thing that I'd really like to, to see and kind of explore a little bit more is at the moment, one, one of the things is, is very clear from young people is that everything that social media platforms are doing are very reactive.
And I would like to see some form of digital education that includes like algorithmic literacy as a taught skill. So not just about is this content harmful or is it not, uh, why are we seeing this? Like how is, what are the mechanisms or channels that have facilitated me encountering this content in, in this space. And I feel like that element of transparency is currently missing. Even as a researcher, we can access data from, from social media platforms to a certain extent, but even then the exact parameters of what data we're getting, uh, why that sample, all of these kind of methodological concerns, um, present challenges for researchers in, in understanding like all of these things as well. I'm really interested in kind of exploring like the channels, the mechanisms, the infrastructures behind why some content is and why some isn't.
[00:26:54] Alan Renwick: Well, thank you so much Emma. We will have to have you on again in order to discuss these matters further and, uh, to, to hear the latest stages of that, uh, research that you're doing. But it has been great to talk about these matters with you today.
Because we've been talking about research that is ongoing. Uh, we can't point you to any publications on Emma's work exploring young people's experience quite yet. But some of Emma's research on viral spread, which we briefly mentioned there is already out.
That includes an article called How does social media content go viral across platforms? Modelling the spread of Kamala is brat across X, TikTok, and Instagram, and that article was published in 2025 in the Journal of Information Technology and Politics. We will, as ever, put full details in the show notes for this episode.
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I'm Alan Renwick. This episode was produced by Eleanor Kingwell-Banham. Our theme music is written and performed by John Mann.
This has been UCL Uncovering Politics. Thank you for listening.