Think about the last time you were online. Did you use the platform to be social, or just to consume videos from people you have never met? In a recent essay in Social Media + Society, danah boyd discusses this trend, and asserts that twenty years in, the platforms we still call social media have quietly become something else. Users are far more likely to scroll than post, and most of what they consume is produced by creators and curated by algorithms. boyd argues that we should stop calling these tools social media and start calling them parasocial media. This is because we are no longer mostly building two-way relationships with friends. Rather, we are primarily watching one-sided performances aimed at the masses.
I think she is right. And I think the change she describes deserves a careful look from those of us who care about young people and want them to thrive online. I have spent more than two decades working alongside teens, families, schools, clinicians, and youth-serving professionals. The vast majority of young people I encounter are not in crisis. They are figuring out their lives in online environments that most adults did not grow up in, often with more self-awareness than we give them credit for. Pew Research Center reported that 74% of teens say social media makes them feel more connected to their friends, and 67% say it makes them feel like they have people who can support them through tough times. Young people find creative outlets, develop proficiencies , encounter ideas they would never see otherwise, find their “people,” and stay close to loved ones across distances. That matters so much.
At the same time, the experience of being a young person online today is very different from what it was a decade ago, and the field that support young people have not fully caught up. For the last twenty years, much of our online safety advice has rested on interpersonal lessons. “Be kind.” “Pause before you post.” “Block, mute, and report.” “Talk to a trusted adult.” Those lessons remain important and should not disappear. But they assume something that is increasingly less true: that what happens online is primarily an exchange between people who know one another. In a parasocial environment, much of what young people experience online is not interaction at all. It is watching. And our prevention, education, and response frameworks have not fully adapted to this change.
For the last twenty years, much of our online safety advice has rested on interpersonal lessons. “Be kind.” “Pause before you post.” “Block, mute, and report.” “Talk to a trusted adult.” Those lessons remain important and should not disappear. But they assume something that is increasingly less true: that what happens online is primarily an exchange between people who know one another.
Reading danah’s piece pushed me to think through a few specific areas where the experience looks different now and what the implications are for parents, educators, and clinicians. None of these are reasons to panic. Rather, they are reasons to be more thoughtful about what we do.
Viral moments may require crisis intervention
When online platforms were primarily a place to talk with friends, conflict mostly stayed between friends. Something happened at school, spilled into a group chat, and a small number of peers piled on. It was a problem, but was mostly contained. Posts did sometimes go viral, but for the average teen, the audience for a rough or embarrassing moment was usually the audience they already knew.
In a parasocial environment, most of what circulates is content made for broad audiences rather than messages exchanged between peers. The same kind of moment can travel much further. A teen who posts something awkward, says something thoughtless on a livestream, or appears in a video recorded without their knowledge can find that clip in front of millions of strangers within hours. A student does something embarrassing in a school hallway, another student captures it, and within days the clip has millions of comments judging the kid, dragging their family, and tagging their school. The original conflict involved three people. However, the public reaction involves three million.
For the adults who serve these youth, the stakes of a single moment are higher than they used to be, and the time horizon for recovery is longer. Helping a teen navigate a viral moment looks more like crisis intervention than relational repair.
For the adults who serve these youth, the stakes of a single moment are higher than they used to be, and the time horizon for recovery is longer. Helping a teen navigate a viral moment looks more like crisis intervention than relational repair. Educators must first guide the young person away from the device, but should not delete the content immediately if doing so would erase digital evidence or signal panic. They should use formal platform reporting paths where the content is circulating, and should document timestamps, URLs, and screenshots in case they are needed for school administration and possibly law enforcement. They should loop in counselors, and if the content is sexual or includes a minor, contact the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children and submit a CyberTipline report. They should also talk with the family about media exposure inside the home, including notifications and group chats, because the same clip will keep finding the teen until the wave subsides. The wave will pass, but on its own timeline rather than theirs.
Clout-seeking cruelty online
When social media was primarily a meeting place where teens hung out together, online cruelty was usually rooted in a friendship or relationship that had gone wrong. In our own work over the past two decades, Justin and I have consistently found that most cyberbullying among adolescents involves peers who know each other offline. In a parasocial model, where posting is increasingly about reaching audiences rather than communicating with friends, some of that cruelty has changed shape. We are seeing more cases where teens mock, “expose,” or roast a peer specifically to grow a following or earn engagement. Roast accounts, fight pages, and clip aggregators have become their own ecosystem across the broader social media space, and journalists covering K-12 schools have been documenting the pattern for several years now.
This is not bullying as adults remember it. The classic aggressor often wanted dominance over a specific target, and the foundational definition of bullying from Dan Olweus has long centered on a power imbalance between aggressor and target. The audience-driven aggressor generally wants something different. They want followers, watch time, and the thrill of a viral moment, and emerging research on popularity goals and cyberbullying perpetration supports this reframing. The target may be interchangeable, since whoever is trending in their school or town that week will do.
For youth-serving adults, this matters because the usual conflict-resolution toolkit assumes a relationship between aggressor and target. Restorative conversations and “how would you feel if” reflective questions all rely on the two parties having some prior connection, and when the relationship is barely there, those approaches do not work. This is because the aggressor was not trying to hurt that specific person, but performing for a feed. Suspending an aggressor or moving a target to a different class is not going to do much when the social rewards driving the behavior come from people the target may never meet. Furthermore, traditional discipline can backfire by allowing the aggressor to cast themselves as persecuted, which might even grow their audience.
Restorative conversations and “how would you feel if” reflective questions all rely on the two parties having some prior connection, and when the relationship is barely there, those approaches do not work. This is because the aggressor was not trying to hurt that specific person, but performing for a feed.
This means that administrators and counselors should now be asking different questions to their students. These might include: “Where is this content circulating, and who is amplifying it?” “Are there accounts in our school community whose entire purpose is mocking other students?” “What is our process for identifying and reporting such accounts, and for supporting the students they target?” The answers received, then, can deeply inform institutional policies and procedures.
What does their feed contain?
In a solely friend-based feed, content used to run out (or become repetitive) on its own. When peers ran out of new posts, scrolling stopped. In a parasocial feed, where the supply of content from creators and strangers is far larger than any one person can exhaust, the experience of running out is rare. Adolescents themselves describe this clearly. They open the app to check one thing and look up an hour later, often without having reached anyone they actually know.
When a feed was dominated by posts from friends, what a young person saw was shaped by who they knew. In a parasocial feed, what they see is shaped by what they engage with. The longer they watch a particular kind of video, the more of that kind tends to appear. Asking a young person what they have been seeing online has become as essential as asking what they have been doing online.
This is what I want everyone working with young people to understand. We have spent two decades teaching adults to ask about behavior: “What did you post?” “Who did you talk to?” Those questions still matter. Unfortunately, though, they only capture some of a teen’s online life. The rest has to do what their feeds contain. Plus, most prevention messaging still assumes harm comes from what young people post, send, or interact with. However, because so much of online life is now spent watching rather than doing, exposure itself can become a source of distress. This concern is not limited to social media; instead, it cuts across the broader interactive environment that young people inhabit.
Here is how it has looked in practice. Students at school anonymously share graphic, sexual, or violent content with peers, and the unsuspecting recipient sees an image that lodges in memory. In multiplayer games, voice chats, and game lobbies, young players encounter slurs, threats, sexualized comments from strangers, and graphic content shared by people they do not know. On livestreaming platforms, young viewers occasionally stumble onto self-harm, violence, or suicide broadcasts in real time. In group chats, one member might choose to share disturbing material, and the rest of the group sees it whether they wanted to or not.
A teen who never engaged in a conflict, sent a risky message, or did anything problematic can still be quietly hurt by what they have been watching. Parents and clinicians should build a few simple questions into intake appointments, parent-teen check-ins, and counselor visits. These might include: “When you open your feeds, what kinds of videos come up?” “Has anything you have seen lately stuck with you in a bad way?” “Has the kind of content you see changed in the last few weeks?” “Is there anything you wish you had not seen?” Answers here can reveal patterns the young person may not bring up on their own, because to them their feed is simply their feed. They may not realize that what they are being served is unusual, or that it is weighing on them. They just have not thought about it that much (if at all).
When something disturbing has been seen, a few simple practices help young people regain a sense of control over their environment. Parents can work with their teen to reset recommendations where that option exists, clear watch and search histories, switch to chronological feeds where possible, mute or unfollow accounts that pull the feed in directions that do not serve them (this is something I constantly emphasize during student assemblies!), and follow accounts that bring genuine value, including educators, athletes, artists, and family. Parents should also try one more habit which in our field we call “co-use.” It’s exactly what it sounds like; we want adults to sit next to their teen and scroll through the recommendation feed alongside them. The point is not to police it but simply to observe and make some mental notes, because 30 seconds of shared scrolling will teach a parent more than 30 minutes of asking. None of these are cure-alls, but together they can change what comes through the feed, and how your teen navigates it.
Parents should also try one more habit which in our field we call “co-use.” It’s exactly what it sounds like; we want adults to sit next to their teen and scroll through the recommendation feed alongside them. The point is not to police it but simply to see it, because 30 seconds of shared scrolling will teach a parent more than 30 minutes of asking.
Comparison against creators, not peers
While research on the impact of online social comparison remains mixed, I want to focus on a more fundamental shift among youth. With parasocial media, their reference point for what a “normal” life, friend group, vacation, daily routine, or future career path looks like has changed. Teens are now measuring themselves against a curated stream of professionally lit performances, instead of against their friends. We may bring up in ad-hoc conversations that comparison is the thief of joy, but I think we need to be a lot more intentional and strategic.
First, our media literacy efforts need to expand from “how to evaluate a source” to “how to read a creator economy.” Educators should teach students to ask questions such as: “Who is paying this person, directly or indirectly, and what would change if the sponsor went away?” “What is this creator selling, even if just want you to watch them or wish you had their life?” “What did the room, the meal, the trip, or the wardrobe look like before lighting, makeup, editing, and post-production?” “Is the moment I am seeing the polished result of hours of work, or is it being presented as spontaneous?” “When I feel inadequate after watching something, what specifically am I comparing myself to, and is the comparison fair?” These questions turn a passive viewer into a digitally literate one and can be modeled at home, taught in advisory periods, and brought up during class time.
Also, what young people most often need is not a lecture about excessive use, but honest, ongoing dialogue about what they are seeing, what they are thinking about as a result, and how the gap between online portrayals and lived life is affecting them. Parents and other trusted adults should ask: “What kinds of creators do you follow most, and what do you like about them?” “Has anyone you watch made you feel worse about yourself, your friendships, your family, or your future?” “Is there a creator you used to enjoy but no longer do, and do you remember what changed?” “When you close out of your feed, do you usually feel better or worse than when you opened it?” Adults do not need to understand every platform or trend, but they do need to listen without judgment.
A rise in harms from online strangers?
When most online interaction happened between peers, threats from strangers were less central to a young person’s daily experience. In the earlier era of chat rooms, much of our cultural anxiety focused on adult strangers approaching kids, and research from David Finkelhor, Janis Wolak, and colleagues at the Crimes against Children Research Center documented the patterns and risk factors during that period. As platforms moved toward identity-based networks built around schools, sports teams, and friend groups, young people gained more control over their online social circles. They could identify most everyone, and they could block, mute, and report. Predators still existed, but most teens were spending most of their time online among peers they actually knew.
It seems that this new era of parasocial media has reverted the trend, placing strangers back at the center of young people’s online experiences. In an environment where much more happens in audience-driven spaces between people who do not know each other, and where public posting is occurring more often to build an audience, bad actors may have an easier time reaching young people at scale.
In an environment where much more happens in audience-driven spaces between people who do not know each other, and where public posting is occurring more often to build an audience, bad actors may have an easier time reaching young people at scale.
As an example, financial sextortion involving minors has surged. Our own work at the Cyberbullying Research Center, including our recent paper showing that teen sexting and sextortion risk are rising in parallel, describes this in detail. Thorn’s research on minor sextortion reaches similar conclusions, and federal data confirms this trend, as the U.S. Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network reported that in 2024 the FBI received nearly 55,000 reports of sextortion-related crimes. This represents a 59% increase over the prior year, with losses around $33.5 million and a noteworthy number of associated suicides.
Most schemes are run by organized criminal networks operating from outside the country, often targeting teen boys. Typically, a predator builds a fake profile of an attractive same-age peer, finds the teen through public posts or follower lists, makes initial contact, moves quickly to a private channel, builds rapport and then intimacy, and eventually pressures the teen to send a sexual image. Once the predator has that material, they will use it to blackmail and extort. The parasocial connection is obvious, as predators rely on public visibility to identify targets and on the normalcy of stranger contact to make a first message feel routine.
Deepfake abuse follows a similar trajectory. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children reported 4,700 CyberTipline reports related to generative AI in 2023, 67,000 in 2024, and 440,000 in just the first half of 2025. A 2026 WIRED and Indicator investigation documented incidents at roughly 90 schools across 28 countries since 2023, affecting more than 600 identified student victims (with the real number believed to be much higher). The parasocial connection here is the same. The raw material for a deepfake, a single clear photo of a teen’s face, is abundant precisely because young people post publicly, often to grow audiences of their own. Accordingly, an aggressor who never met the teen can pull a profile photo, generate sexual imagery, and weaponize it within an afternoon.
GIven this, the prevention conversation has to change. Strangers who never met your teen can now produce images that look like them and use them as a weapon. Youth should, with the help of adults as needed, go through and lock down what is publicly visible on social profiles, including profile photos and follower lists. They should be skeptical of new accounts that move quickly to flattery, romance, or requests for private contact. They should report sextortion attempts to the FBI and use NCMEC’s Take It Down service to remove known images. Most importantly, they should seek help from an adult immediately, because complying with the demands almost never ends the threat and usually escalates it.
What this means for youth-serving adults
What I am sharing should not make you assume that the answer is to take phones away or to treat every teen as a victim in waiting. That misreads the evidence and, frankly, misreads young people. Most are doing fine, many are thriving, and numerous youth engage with platforms in positive ways every day.
The point of boyd’s parasocial framing is more specific. It offers a definitional change that has significant consequences for those of us doing applied work with young people. Once we accept that the experience of being online has moved from interaction with people we know toward consumption of content from people we do not, the way in which we support young people changes.
For parents, this means asking different questions, paying attention to what their teens are being shown rather than only what they are posting, and occasionally watching their feed alongside them. For educators, this means updating media literacy to include the economics and mechanics of the creator-driven feed alongside historically ensconced lessons about online safety and appropriate behavior. It also means building regular, low-stakes opportunities for students to talk about what they have been seeing, not just what they have been doing.
For clinicians and counselors, this means making exposure history a routine part of intake and follow-up. Borrowed from trauma care, occupational medicine, and pediatric guidance, the term refers to a structured account of what a person has encountered, when, how often, and with what reaction. Guidance on media use from the American Academy of Pediatrics supports asking patients about media content alongside duration. Exposure history belongs in clinical conversations because what young people are shown affects their inner life as much as what they do.
Ultimately, the change from social to parasocial does not mean the end of social media. It is a more honest description of what these platforms have already become, and it should change how we approach them. The young people in our homes, classrooms, and clinics deserve adults who see their world as it truly is today. If we do that, we will be able to serve and support them in the most optimal ways. While that remains our preeminent goal, it also remains our biggest challenge.
