“DM drama/secrets/anything, don’t be shy 😏” read the Instagram account bio for @Mill_HS_drama.1 It was a tea account: a designated place for anonymously “spilling the tea,” aka sharing gossip and confessions. The premise of such accounts is simple. Anyone can DM (direct message) the account owner to share confessions, tips, or information. The account owner then screenshots and posts each message—without the sender’s name—on the account’s public page. Reading the posts on @Mill_HS_drama feels a bit like reading notes scrawled on the back of a bathroom door:2
I have a crush on [Boy A] and [Boy B] they are so hot and cute i don’t know how to tell them. Keep this anonymous.
Make this anonymous but I know for a fact [Girl A] and [Boy C] are dating.
The posts are redacted haphazardly and without any clear logic. This results in a mix of posts that openly name their subjects and others that have strategically placed edits. So, while the readers learn that “Rachel” and “Connor” are dating, they are left to speculate who is being talked about in the post that reads: “NAME uses a deodorant that we found buried under a septic tank.”
Some @Mill_HS_drama posts seem helpful, even prosocial. They warn girls about a guy who is asking for nudes and then screenshotting those nudes and using them as blackmail. They condemn homophobia and call out a particular grade: “Kids going into 9th need to stop being homophobic.” There are also posts like this one: “Got a piece of tea for u. [Boy X] is a rapist.” The post immediately reminds me (Emily) of an interview discussion I had with a specific teen (see the “Social Media Can Make Things ‘Ten Times Worse’” box).
In chapter 3, we described the Transformation Framework.4 It is built on the premise that fifteen-year-old Brian articulated so well: social media is not simply another context that mirrors social dynamics. Rather, its very affordances transform the landscape of adolescents’ experiences. People who would never be in a bathroom stall at Mill High School can easily access and read the digital posts. These posts are shared anonymously and are viewable by vast unintended audiences, potentially permanent, and easily spread. In other words: this isn’t just graffiti to cover with a fresh coat of paint.
Before the rise of tea accounts on Instagram, apps like YikYak and (briefly) Streetchat enabled similar kinds of publicly available commentary. The specific platforms teens use will surely continue to shift. Yet there’s a toxic trio of enduring features that seems to fuel this kind of pernicious gossip.
The first feature is geographic specificity, or “geospecificity.” Different tech features are used to tether posts from “the cloud” to very specific physical places, whether it’s Mill High School, Arizona State University, or Smithtown. YikYak leveraged geospecificity so that posts were searchable and viewable to people in a small radius, and it was especially popular on college campuses. So, at Arizona State for example, any students who opened the app in the vicinity of their campus could see the bulletin board-style collection of anonymous “yaks” shared by their classmates. In the case of the Mill High School tea account, which was housed on Instagram, simply including the school name in the account’s @handle facilitated searchability. As more students started following it, the account became known, recognized, and likely even more readily discoverable on Mill High students’ Instagram Searches. The algorithm supports this by tailoring Search and Explore content based on both a user’s likes and those of other people they follow.5
The second feature is an attentive and interested audience. The public (or potentially public) context of social media amplifies drama as conflicts are “performed” in front of an audience of peers.6 Posts are shared to be seen. Even if a teen doesn’t want to be part of the drama, she can feel compelled to monitor gossip accounts to make sure she isn’t named—or at least to know if she is. People use these accounts for different reasons: curiosity, boredom, anxiety, or malicious intent. Whatever the motive, the presence of an attentive audience breathes continued life into these accounts.
The third feature is the ability to post anonymously. Whether posts are (or remain) truly anonymous, teens feel like they can share without identifiability and, therefore, accountability. This is particularly valuable if a teen wants to say something mean, but not be seen as mean. As one teen explained, “The thing about tea pages is that they’re anonymous. So I think that’s given an outlet for people who don’t want to be mean outright. They send anonymous messages to tea pages . . . and that doesn’t have, like, any connection [to them]. It’s anonymous. So it’s an easy way to insult people or cyberbully people without being the cyberbully, publicly.”
Tea pages are a prime example of the ways social media affordances transform the landscape of social conflict. In the pages that follow, we dig into other recent incarnations. Digital information can spread rapidly. It’s also easily replicated via screenshots and can be made visible—or rendered invisible—to audiences of varying sizes. However, as we describe in the box “Not Just for Gossip and Bullying,” these affordances aren’t leveraged only for harmful purposes: they can be tapped in the service of civic goals too.
Anonymity is implicated in tea pages and the like, and its veil empowers posts teens may hesitate to share from their real accounts for a variety of reasons. But even when people aren’t anonymous, they at times behave behind the screen in ways that they would not in person. Teens are well aware of this idea, which scholars call “online disinhibition.”9 Digital communication emboldens people to share more freely and say things they might never say in person. Or, as teens in our research put it, “Words on the internet hurt just as much as in real life, and the bullies feel more empowered and are generally harsher because they are on a screen. [They] feel their words have no meaning, and that it’s just fun and games” (twelve-year-old); “It’s so easy to hide behind a screen. Behind a screen one can be anything they want” (thirteen-year-old).
Again, anonymity isn’t always a bad thing. For example, disinhibition can lead to more open and honest self-disclosure. On the one hand, such benign disinhibition can benefit teens’ emotional well-being by supporting closeness and intimacy with friends.10 On the other hand, toxic disinhibition enables antisocial and mean behaviors like name calling, threats, and aggressive swearing.11
Interestingly, it’s the lack of eye contact in text-based digital communication that seems particularly key to understanding toxic disinhibition. Experimental manipulations show that people are more hostile when they chat without eye contact.12 Eye contact—even occurring through a webcam—leads to fewer heated exchanges, further confirmation that FaceTime is meaningfully different from texting.
The absence of both eye contact and identifiability can contribute to toxicity and bullying. However, it’s not the case that digital cruelty is always or even usually anonymous. To the contrary, teens who are cyberbullied typically know who is behind the aggression. In one study with 451 teens, fully 92 percent who had been victims of cyberbullying reported that they knew the perpetrator.13 This pattern is replicated in other studies, too, which clarifies that even if anonymity fuels disinhibition and meanness, most cyberbullying isn’t anonymous.14
For years, we observed and heard about instances in which adolescents shared harsh comments with “friends” under the guise of wanting to be honest. To explore a hunch, we asked teens to weigh in on this statement: “If a friend asks for honest opinions on an anonymous app, you should respond honestly even if it hurts their feelings.” Interestingly, a majority (56 percent or 1,611 out of 2,909 respondents to the survey question) agreed with privileging honesty over kindness.
It’s likely that developmental forces are at play. Adolescent egocentrism15 can mean prioritizing personal concerns, in this case a bias toward thinking “I want to be honest and say what’s on my mind” over “my friend might be quite hurt by this.” Social perspective taking is implicated, too, since it’s required to make such judgments. Perspective taking involves making inferences about things—like what others might want or how they might feel. Importantly, we know that social perspective-taking skills develop over time, rather than all once16—and that this competence is still developing across the adolescent years.17 Thus, adolescents can both care deeply about others and still reason that a friend who asks “What do others think of me?” deserves an unfiltered response.
There are also times when hostile comments are made intentionally to hurt others. Bullying is traditionally defined as unwanted aggression that is intentional, repeated, and carried out by someone who is in a position of power over their victim.18 When such cruelty is communicated through digital devices, it falls into the category of cyberbullying.19
How common is cyberbullying? Overall, about one-third of youth in the United States report that they have experienced cyberbullying at some point in their lives. Researchers Sameer Hinduja and Justin Patchin have spent more than a dozen years tracking the nature and prevalence of cyberbullying in the United States, including with large, nationally representative samples. They ask youth about experiences when someone “repeatedly makes fun of another person online or repeatedly picks on another person through email or text message or when someone posts something online about another person that they don’t like.” Looking across their various studies, they found that about 28 percent of youths had been cyberbullied at some point during their lifetimes, and roughly 16 percent had at some point cyberbullied another person.20 The experience of being cyberbullied was somewhat higher in Hinduja and Patchin’s 2019 nationally representative survey of middle and high schoolers as compared to their earlier surveys. Of 4,972 students in the study, 36.5 percent said they had been cyberbullied at some point during their lifetimes and more than 1 in 6 (17.4 percent) had been cyberbullied in the past month. Nearly 15 percent (14.8 percent) reported that they had at some point bullied someone else, and 6.3 percent said they had done so in the past month.
A striking finding from our own research: teens perceive a causal, even inevitable path from being cyberbullied to mental health crises. This was a repeated sentiment as teens described worries about cyberbullying and drama: “Lots of kids have killed themselves because of cyberbullying.” Suicide is a commonly feared and cited outcome. “Suicide rates are getting higher due to cyberbullying, and I don’t want me or my friends and family to fall into the group of people who have committed [suicide].” Such fears can understandably amp up anxiety.
Most young people who are cyberbullied do not commit suicide.21 It’s also a pervasive misconception that cyberbullying is the worst type of bullying. In her well-researched book, 25 Myths about Bullying and Cyberbullying, Elizabeth Englander explains: “Cyberbullying doesn’t stand out as significantly worse or different than other social challenges. This doesn’t mean cyberbullying doesn’t hurt; but there’s no compelling body of evidence demonstrating that it hurts significantly more than other harmful social interactions. . . . When we look at cases where cyberbullying is implicated in a suicide, we almost always see that the child in question was already struggling with depression and/or other emotional challenges.”22
That said, cyberbullying is a serious cause for concern especially when it’s happening to youth who are already in distress. It’s especially devastating when it co-occurs with bullying at school. Compared to students who had not been subject to such aggression, Hinduja and Patchin’s research indicates that youth who experienced both bullying and cyberbullying were more than five times as likely to have thought about suicide and more than eleven times as likely to have attempted suicide.23
Teens fear cyberbullying in part because they can feel helpless about both its occurrence and its impact. News coverage isn’t helping. In the United States, news stories about cyberbullying are significantly more likely than those about traditional bullying to use fear-based language, including alarmist words like “tragic” and “epidemic,” anxiety-related vocabulary like “fearful” and “worried,” and terminology directly related to death (for example: an article headlined “The Top Six Unforgettable Cyberbullying Cases Ever” describes teen deaths from suicide).24
Blatant cruelty takes shape in myriad ways through devices. Some actions clearly meet the criteria for cyberbullying. Others—like receiving a single hateful text message or being publicly shamed by a former friend via a Snapchat Story—may be one-off aggressions but are no less relevant.
Because mobile devices offer anywhere and anytime connection, mean messages sent by text or direct message can instantly reach their target. For teens, this transforms experiences of hostility because it creates a sense that there is no respite. In their words:
When you go home you can’t get a break from drama or bullying. (twelve-year-old)
Constant direct access to someone to bully them is miserable. They aren’t even safe in their own home, when their phone is with them. (fifteen-year-old)
It’s [a] big concern for me because I never know when I might get a comment that’s mean. (eighteen-year-old)
Mean messages can also be sent in ways that are intentionally ephemeral, such as through Snapchat, which poses a challenge to documenting evidence of harassment. Although technically snaps can be screenshotted, the sender is by default alerted (unless a teen knows workarounds, which do exist).
Most teens can’t just turn off their devices to escape hostility. So much of teens’ lives happens with and through devices. Disconnecting comes at a high cost: missing messages from friends, details about social plans, and even timely information about school and extracurricular activities. When drama is unfolding, disconnecting can also mean being out of the loop as malicious content may be circulating. Painful as it is to know, not knowing can bring its own form of anxiety.
Hostility is also enacted in front of—even for—an audience. Indeed, publicness is yet another quality that transforms adolescents’ peer experiences.25 Someone who wants to embarrass or shame a peer can post harsh public or semi-public comments. They can submit a piece of damaging gossip—whether true or false—to a tea account and then watch from a comfortable distance as tensions escalate.
In rarer and more extreme cases, someone might create a fake account that uses another teen’s real name and features unflattering content, like photoshopped images of the teen’s face on different animal bodies. Or someone might create an impersonation account that is carefully rendered to appear real, with a username that is nearly identical to the person’s actual account handle and pictures taken from their past posts. Such accounts can be used to send messages that damage the person’s friendships or reputation; to follow problematic groups that link the person to hateful causes; or to post comments meant to spark backlash and get the person in trouble.
“Airing people out” or “exposing” them is another way to exploit the publicness of social media, particularly when a teen feels their wrath is warranted because another teen has crossed a line. “Receipts” refer to screenshots or screen recordings, which are shared to provide proof in the case against someone. Screenshotting is routine. Damning conversations that were meant to be private are made public thanks to easy replicability and shareability. Past transgressions that in a pre-digital era would have been relegated to distant middle school memories can resurface thanks to the persistence of digital content.
It may be tempting to make the case that much of this drama could be avoided if teens would only take more care with their words and actions. But how does one really manage in a context where a friend might later become an enemy who will scroll back through every bit of conversation history to find something indictable?
The reality is that once a teen is called out and “canceled” (i.e., publicly shamed and socially exiled for stepping out of line in some manner), any new post they share is likely to be scrutinized, at least for a while. Tweets, comments, and shared photos may be screenshotted and reposted along with critical analyses that continue the work of publicly blasting the person’s character or behavior. Some audience members are “instigators” who pile on, while others assume the role of loyal defender. Some teens expect friends to publicly have each other’s backs when fights or “calling out” escalate online, jumping into the comment section to express support, allegiance, and commitments of solidarity. Doing so checks the box of validating the aggrieved friend, but also comes with the risk of alienating others and creating drama for themselves. Perhaps most often, though, support happens “backstage,” through direct messages and private texts that offer support and validation. Being a good friend can also mean talking a friend down if they are escalating a social media conflict unnecessarily. As sixteen-year-old Dante told us, he expects friends to tell him when he needs to “Stop talking, walk away.” “I’d expect my friends to do the right thing, not just coming to help me, but like . . . de-escalating the situation. Like ‘Yo [Dante], you’re being stupid right now. Like get your head in the game. You’re not doing the right thing.’”
For those who aren’t close friends but merely onlookers who want to stay out of the drama, watching a peer get dragged down can nonetheless become a dark form of entertainment. As fourteen-year-old Mai put it: it’s “like a football match.”
There’s another kind of digital “football match,” that warrants attention too: the back-and-forth that plays out in comment sections. Tales of threads that devolve into shouting matches abound. When “Girl C” posted a picture of herself at a women’s march with the caption “the future is female,” a male classmate (we’ll call him “Boy D”) responded: “this comment isn’t correct.” Girl C responded with a defense of the slogan, unpacking the importance of feminism today and the value of broader human rights advocacy. From there the comment thread blew up: more than two hundred comments poured in, with lengthy arguments on both sides.
Tagging was a crucial mechanism that kept people in and coming back to the thread. Generally, tagging allows commenters to directly respond to and call out others, often via sharply worded retorts that make it “hard to leave it alone.” Some comments on “the future is female” thread were ideological; others were direct and personal: “@BoyD, for once, stop giving everyone a very good reason to dislike you.” At least one commenter leveraged the opportunity for anonymity and used a fake account to weigh in.
Boy D never backed down. Eventually, Girl C went through and deleted all comments she didn’t agree with, leaving a robust one-sided documentation of the argument.
But, again, tech features go both ways and tagging is no exception. Just as it is used to stoke conflict, tagging is also used for supportive, friendly purposes. If a teen tags her friend in a post that is likely to be of interest, her friend gets a notification and immediate access to that post. This makes tagging an easy way to share content. Sharing found content like relatable memes is a common, fun, and often funny way to build a closeness. It’s also a practical method for circulating important news or information.
Tagging and a related practice—DMing (direct messaging)—can cross a line into subtler jabs or even blatant hostility. Tagging someone in a post with the caption “this is you” can be a compliment, a joke, or a jab depending on what the post shows. Even then, it can be a guessing game. The person who’s tagged won’t always know what it means. Genevieve, for example, is a huge Taylor Swift fan. When one of her more peripheral friends tagged Genevieve in a post about people who are obsessed with Taylor, Genevieve was unsure: Was it meant to mock her fandom? Or was it meant to be a friendly gesture, along the lines of, “This made me think of you since I know you love Taylor.” This kind of ambiguous digital tagging is common. Teens often wonder: “Are they laughing at me or with me?”
Social media enables a host of ambiguous acts that can leave teens anxiously puzzling about others’ intentions. Consider seventh grader Jessa seeing a social media post from the party she was at earlier. Another girl posted a group picture but cropped Jessa out of the shot. Jessa knew the other girl could deny that it was meant as a jab. The photocropper might argue that the full picture didn’t look as good or support the “aesthetic” she was going for. Or, she could say that it was an unflattering shot of Jessa and she was trying to spare Jessa embarrassment.
Such is a perennial puzzle of navigating social life in a digital world: it can be hard to know when something on social media is done in order to hurt someone’s feelings versus done without even considering their feelings. Admittedly, considering every possible viewer’s feelings before posting is unrealistic. Because so much is documented and shared, a teen occasionally seeing pictures of even close friends socializing without them is simply a given. Still, sometimes posts are shared with decidedly hurtful intentions. This ambiguity can lead even confident teens into a spiral of self-doubt. As one fifteen-year-old explained:
My friends hung out without me. And of course [when I saw it on social media] it was such an, “oh my God” feeling. Like, “oh my God, am I out of the group now? Oh my God.” . . . It’s not like I really care about what people think, but it’s like we’ve been friends since middle school. So am I out of the group? Like I’m not in the circle anymore? And as much as we try to ignore that feeling deep down in our hearts we still feel like, “oh my God, is something wrong with me, like, are they ignoring me?”
In chapter 3, we described various ways that teens signal and perform closeness for an audience of peers. Here, we see how online posts can also make teens wonder if they’re being sidelined or even pushed out of a friend group. In other cases, posts can imply a desire for distance or even a demotion from best friend status. Again, it’s not always clear. Consider Ruby seeing that her friend had tagged her in a TikTok video that linked different pairs of best friends and showed their horoscopes. The poster had paired herself with one friend and paired Ruby with another. Ruby wasn’t sure what to make of it: was the poster trying to tell Ruby that she didn’t consider Ruby to be her best friend? Was she trying to send a message that she wished they were closer? Or was it a fun and friendly act that was meant to be inclusive since she was featuring her three best friends in the video in the first place?
In other cases, teens analyze likes and comments for signs of closeness, distance, or conflict. For example, Dee circled back to look at the comments on her friend’s recent picture. She had commented that her friend looked “so gorgeous” and saw that her friend had liked the comment. But then she noticed that all the comments left by other close friends had received not only a like from the original poster but also a personal reply. Dee was instantly worried that her friend might be mad at her. In at least some teen circles, social norms dictate levels of comment replies. Liking a nice comment is the bare minimum of civility; commenting back (e.g., responding with a comment like “thanks gurl miss u lysm [love you so much]!!!”) is a level up and seen as more endearing. And liking every comment save one can be downright insulting.
Ambiguous interactions like these also unfold in online gaming, although in distinct ways. Gamers describe how the very same taunts and heat-of-the-moment trash talk (“you’re so garbage”; “you’re so bad”) can reflect a relaxed, “playful” closeness or be experienced as harsh, rude, or full on “bullying.” Tone is key, but so too is the nature of the relationship. Microaggressions as well as more overtly sexist, anti-gay, and racist comments are also a persistent feature of gaming culture, especially with the expansion of live streaming on visible digital platforms like Twitch.26
Yes, hostility can be blatant and clear. But there are also jabs that are much less apparent to outsiders. Subtle jabs characterize much—perhaps even most—of teens’ social struggles behind the screen. Pablo described how his guy friends’ banter might seem in jest but can snowball: “for guys on social media, I see a lot of one-upping each other . . . like a ‘I’m better than you’ competition. And that’s how things escalate a lot. Because it’s mainly either jealousy or overconfidence about what other dudes can do . . . it usually escalates that way.”
A further example: when two girls “have beef,” a comment like, “oh my God, you’re so gorgeous, I wish I could be you” might be offered “through gritted teeth,” and meant as sarcastic and aggressive. These examples echo the concept of “social steganography” that danah boyd first wrote about over a decade ago. The idea here is that multiple meanings for different audiences are layered into online posts. In the case of a digital jab, coded language becomes a way of hiding the slight “in plain sight.”27 Indeed, posts that appear wholly benign are sometimes masked attempts to hurt a particular person. When one teen was angry at his best friend, he went out of his way to post pictures with other friends on his Snapchat Story—hoping, even knowing—that his best friend would see.
Teens can weaponize the chance to control what people see in other ways too. Removing someone from a Private Story is yet another digital jab. Because many teens use Private (or semi-private) Stories to share with their closest friends, the act of revoking someone’s viewing access can be a power move to convey anger or stir conflict. People aren’t notified when they’ve been removed from seeing someone’s Stories. They find out only by either asking someone or realizing that they’re out of the loop.
Creating spin-off group chats has a similar effect, digitally evicting someone from the ongoing group conversation; recall Lila’s story from chapter 3. And yet, removing someone from a Story or chat isn’t always hostile. It can be an acknowledgment that a friendship is no longer close (“a good amount of the time, it’s not malicious. It’s just, hey . . . I don’t think that this person who I knew well maybe a year ago but I don’t know as well now, needs to be on there. Or stuff like that.”) This ambiguity contributes to stress, which isn’t so easily brushed off. Peer rejection is even more emotionally distressing for adolescents than it is for adults.28 While being excluded can be painful at any age, it’s especially hard for teens for whom peer validation is an essential developmental need. Being left out can prompt real feelings of self-doubt and inadequacy.
Take the following example, which is a composite version of stories we heard on repeat: Juliana shares on her social media account a picture with her boyfriend, Marco. One of Juliana’s (former) friends was hooking up with Marco previously and some of Juliana’s friends have turned on her since she and Marco started dating. One of those friends, Ayanna, leverages the easy replicability of digital content and takes a screenshot of Juliana’s picture with Marco. Ayanna then adds her own touch—an oversized vomiting emoji right next to Juliana and Marco’s faces—and reposts the screenshot on her Close Friends Story. Only about twenty-five of Ayanna’s closest friends see her Private Stories. Although Juliana was among that group in the past, Ayanna revoked Juliana’s access when she and Marco first started dating. But Juliana and Ayanna still have a number of mutual friends. About ninety seconds after Ayanna reposted the picture of Juliana and Marco, one of those mutual friends took her own screenshot—a screenshot of the screenshot—and promptly texted it to Juliana to clue her in.
When conflicts erupt online, teens describe different paths that unfold. In one similar incident, the boyfriend went on his own TikTok and posted a video about how people need to stay out of other people’s business. He didn’t tag or call out the girl directly. But two things were true: one, everyone who knew, knew. That is, everyone who knew the context knew exactly what the boyfriend was talking about. And two, almost everyone who didn’t know immediately wanted to know. This may be what’s most powerful about an ambiguous, frustration-fueled airing of grievances: the whole audience is rapt, digitally rubbernecking to see what’s happened and what will go down next.
What goes down next depends heavily on teens’ offline contexts. Whether the spark is an ambiguous act, a subtle jab, or a blatant call-out, teens describe meaningful differences in the fallout of digital drama and conflict. Their stories show how context profoundly shapes the nature and implications of experiences behind the screen. In some contexts, when issues start online, tensions may simmer, but they won’t lead to much beyond either social awkwardness or perhaps a tense verbal exchange. Mica can call out someone in another friend group and she might get a dirty look in the hallway, but she knows the conflict won’t escalate much further. The norms in Diego’s school are similar: when people have a beef online, they mostly just ignore each other in person. But other teens have a different experience. “Where I’m from,” lil Ronny explains, “words online lead to fights in the street.”
In one community where online fighting at times carried over to in-person physical fights, a teen in our research recounted how stressful it was to watch peers getting dragged on a local tea account. As tensions escalated, people started “dropping addresses” in the comments—that is, posting the home addresses of those teens whose behavior was in question, amplifying the threat of a physical confrontation. Others describe fights that begin online and provoke explicit dares to “keep up the same [hostile] energy” when in person.
Researchers Caitlin Elsaesser, Desmond Patton, and their colleagues (including me, Emily) studied the experiences of adolescents who live in disinvested neighborhoods in Hartford, Connecticut.29 The aim was to understand when and how social media fights escalate to offline violence. Social media features, particularly comments, intensify conflict and spill over into physical fighting. Similarly, teens on our advisory council for this book described people dropping addresses in the comments to expose and threaten others’ sense of safety at home. The Hartford-based study revealed that teens also drop addresses to specify locations to meet up and fight. Importantly, the publicness and quantifiability of social media comments can contribute to a sense that fights are expected and even inevitable, which echoes findings from research in other cities, including multiple studies led by Desmond Patton30 and deep ethnographic work conducted by Jeffrey Lane.31
A key finding across the research is that the public nature of social media ups the ante.32 Other features contribute to conflict too: tagging people allows for direct insults, and references to known public places broadcast where fights will happen. As Patton and colleagues explain, the volume and ease of communication can fuel disinhibition with truly toxic consequences that spill over into street violence.
On an evening in early December 2020, we were in Zoom meeting with some members of our teen advisory council. The conversation had toured the varied twists and turns of how meanness and drama unfold in teens’ online worlds, as we’ve described in this chapter. As we were wrapping up, we asked a standard closing question: Is there anything that is important to teens’ experiences with this topic (digital social conflict) that didn’t come up at all? In other words: What did we miss?
After a brief pause, fifteen-year-old Maeve spoke up. We missed “a big thing,” she told us: “outing people.” That is, revealing their sexual orientation without their consent on social media. Another teen jumped in to agree, “that’s a really big thing.” Turns out, everyone knew someone who had been outed online. A third teen shared a story of a teen being outed on Facebook and, later, seeing a video of him being beaten up. Another told of a gay couple in which one partner was “ready to show the world” but the other was not; the public revelation caused extreme backlash from his family.
But for Maeve, outing wasn’t just something that had happened to a classmate. It was her story. In sixth grade, Maeve was dating a boy but questioning her sexuality. She told him as much and he “wasn’t very nice about it.” The next day, she broke up with him over text. Before too long, the boy told another classmate and, in short order, that classmate “spread it to the entire school.” “I think it really defines the rest of your life, being outed,” Maeve reflected, “It’s like, such an invasion of privacy and an invasion of choice, too. This is something that should be yours, and it’s been taken away from you.” As in Brian’s story about being called a rapist, the role that social media played (if any) wasn’t initially apparent. But like Brian, Maeve then stated clearly, “It was definitely exacerbated by social media. It’s just such a way for news to spread—like on Snapchat, like, ‘Oh did you hear?’ Stuff like that.”
Teens who have secrets of any kind have a heightened vulnerability in a digital context where anything can be made instantly public at any time. The “default publicness” of certain social media sites (especially sites like Facebook that are intentionally designed to be used with people’s “real” names) poses distinct dangers for queer youth.33 This is pronounced on sites with “linkability” to offline social networks. Yet, risks persist regardless of the site. Notably, screenshotting allows digital content to transverse apps and therefore audiences too. Stories like Maeve’s and those of other youth with marginalized identities underscore the reality that the risks of “being in public” are inequitably distributed.
Just as relational aggression, social slights, and physical fighting are far from new, outing and being outed aren’t new either. But once again, social media appears to transform the experience in ways that make the proverbial “writing on the bathroom wall” seem almost quaint by comparison. Teen social conflicts—from small slights to big fights—are at once nothing new and profoundly transformed.
Online drama is “as serious and harmful” as drama in real life—and at times even worse. If someone wants to be mean, they can be relentless. “Even if you escape it on one platform, they’ll probably find their way to the next—and it’s just a whole, like, cat and mouse game.” Digital connectivity makes targeted meanness hard to avoid: “anybody, anywhere, at any time” can send a rude comment or mean message. Social conflicts can also “escalate super fast, from like nothing—zero to 100 . . . one day, [a kid] can be fine, the next day they really can’t.”
Subtle digital jabs complicate the challenge of interpreting what’s meant to provoke a fight or hurt feelings. Not-so-subtle jabs may be crystal clear to the target audience—but conveyed with enough ambiguity to make them hard to prove and even harder to know how to respond.
There can be value in shutting off one’s phone temporarily, whether it’s to simmer down, get some emotional distance, avoid further escalation of a conflict, or rally in-person support. But teens wish adults understood that “you can’t just always ‘shut your phone off’ and be done with it.” Digital conflicts spill over “into the real world.” Responding can feel like a necessity, particularly when conflicts are playing out in a digital public and threaten a teen’s reputation or relationships. Even when exchanges aren’t happening in front of an audience, part of the stress stems from anticipating a forthcoming in-person confrontation or interaction.
In years past—when social technologies supplemented teens’ lives but didn’t necessarily dictate their every move—avoidance may have been a viable option. Complete and prolonged disconnection just isn’t feasible for today’s teens when these technologies are essential to their everyday lives, jobs, and school. This reality can make for an unfortunate comingling of distressing messages (ambiguous jabs in group chat) with important ones (a text from a parent about a ride home from practice). Plus, steering clear of social media or texts often costs teens access to friends and the “support network of people who care about you.”
Teens urge parents “not to blame their child for getting into drama online.” Even if a teen wants nothing to do with drama or fights, they can get pulled in against their will and then struggle to effectively navigate a path out. “Doing the cliched thing of confronting them” (someone who is being mean) isn’t always the best idea. Even when ignoring a jab feels like the best tack, it doesn’t mean teens can ignore their emotional reactions. Painful social moments are “not a thing you can really get over fast.”
What can adults do? Recognize that intense emotional reactions to social slights are expected, developmentally. When in doubt, validate teens’ feelings (“That seems really hard”). Consider that a break from tech might help, and what the costs might be. And resist the urge to conclude that everything they’re facing is too new and different to understand.