One of the most drastic changes to our society in the 21st century has been the development of social media. We use platforms such as Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, and YouTube to keep in touch with friends and share experiences. It’s often advertised in a very positive way, but for teen girls it has more negative than positive effects. How is it that a platform advertised to strengthen connections and provide entertainment can be so damaging to females?
With most of our population on social media platforms, they have become extremely influential. For teens, they’ve been incorporated into the ways we socialize, communicate, and present ourselves.
As the apps have grown in popularity, so has information on how they can negatively affect us. Recently, Meta, Facebook, Google, WhatsApp and YouTube were found guilty of creating addictive and harmful platforms in a landmark court case. All of the companies that were fined share one feature that has proved the most damaging to teens’ mental health. Short videos, which typically span between 15 and 60 seconds, have been proven to have grave implications. Because there’s such a large amount of these videos that are easily accessible, it’s easy to get addicted. On apps like TikTok, which provide a personalized feed, consuming videos keeps you on your phone by continuously triggering dopamine releases. Although these platforms design users’ feeds to be personalized, they purposefully include videos that won’t interest you. By doing this, they utilize a similar strategy to that of a slot machine. The teen brain is highly sensitive to the chemical, which contributes heavily to the addictive nature of social media. In 2025, the average teen user on TikTok spent two hours on the platform, while the average adult user spent just 52 minutes. Many platforms quickly followed suit in creating a portion of their app dedicated to short videos after the TikTok debut in 2017 popularized short videos. Today, nearly all large social media platforms have a scrolling feature.
Although all teenagers have been affected by the addition of social media into our culture, girls have experienced more negative effects than boys. Online, men tend to seek out more information-based content, which translates as spending more time gaming or using platforms like Reddit. Women are drawn to videos that provide relationship advice, beauty tips, and inspiration for self presentation. Females utilize Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat more often because of the higher frequency of this type of content. However, it’s extremely common for those creating videos surrounding beauty, fashion, and their bodies to use filters and specific angles to alter appearance. For audiences of teenagers and young women, this can contribute heavily to issues with self esteem. When all we see online is altered, filtered bodies, it becomes much harder to feel confident in our natural selves.