Teen agency beyond Meta’s reckoning

Meryl is 13. She describes YouTube Shorts as “so addicting”; holding her attention “just long enough” that she loses track of everything else. She is one of dozens of teens who have participated in the research at the Teens, Family, and Technology Lab at Rutgers University. While the 13-year-old’s language is not unusual, teen voices are still largely missing from broader debates about social media use.

Meta’s $17.1 billion settlement with U.S. States is making headlines as a reckoning over addictive platform design. However, not much has been said about how teen agency emerges in a media environment built to predict the most tempting feed. Debates about youth and technology have historically focused on media effects: either what teens do with media, or what media does to teens. Nearly 100 years ago, the Payne Fund Studies marked the first systematic exploration of this dynamic, examining the impact of movies on children. With every new wave of technology, the storyline persists. Youth audiences are typically spoken for — cast as passive, trapped or targeted by new tech.

This framing misses the point. It ignores how the experience of adolescence itself shapes media use, and why certain types of media design captivate teens. Teens’ media use resonates with a powerful framework from developmental psychology: a race car that can go very fast, but whose brakes are still being built. That speed creates both opportunities and risks. Teens are primed to learn more rapidly than at any other stage of development. Yet that power makes teens more vulnerable to negative stimuli. This heightened sensitivity exists alongside a crucial asymmetry: their ability to plan and prioritise (what to do first, what next) develops gradually, even as teens exhibit heightened sensitivity to “rewards” (easily persuaded by things that are pleasing). In today’s media, these rewards arrive via personalised recommendations. When short-form video loops shrink the gap between media experiences to 15 or 30 seconds, the onus of decision-making becomes the young person’s problem at a time when the braking system is still getting built.

Whistleblowers, Silicon Valley defectors, and documentaries such as The Social Dilemma have laid bare how platform design choices erode human agency. What remains absent from public commentary is what teens’ vocabularies reveal about their developmental needs. Across the 13-to-16 age group, teens say that short-form videos are shrinking their attention spans. But their reflections point to a persistent entry point: boredom. I did not go looking for this word, but it kept recurring when teens explained why they wade into short-form videos.

Boredom, peer dynamics

Boredom is a developmental driver. As adolescents shift their orientation toward peers and crave greater independence, they continue to live under adult restrictions. They then open an app seeking a quick distraction, only to find themselves stuck for hours on platforms such as YouTube Shorts or TikTok.

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Peer dynamics drive how teens move across different apps, with platform design acting as an amplifier. On platforms such as Instagram and Snapchat, where popularity is quantified through public likes and follower counts, every interaction gets a scoreboard. For an adolescent hyper-sensitive to social inclusion and exclusion, this design is incredibly stressful. Early evidence from Australia’s social media ban bears this out. Two systematic surveys by Bursztyn and colleagues found that Australian teens report needing roughly 70% of their peers to quit social media before they’re willing to quit themselves.

Research at the Teens, Family, and Technology Lab shows that adolescents navigate an average of 7 to 12 different platforms daily. Instagram and Facebook exist within a competitive teen media inventory alongside Snapchat, YouTube, Pinterest, Discord, Spotify, and more. Here, teens’ recalibration of media practices, and parents’ concerns for their children’s wellbeing act as powerful competitive forces.

While Meta and other platforms chase topline revenues, some teens are crafting micro-frictions to push back. Pinterest is a big hit with girls who want to escape performative sociality; music streaming competes with short-form video apps; and some teens are deleting apps intermittently. These are behavioural signatures of adolescent metacognition — literally, thinking about thinking. Yet AI-fuelled media design continues to operate at the limits of adolescent development, exacerbating tensions between the intentional and accidental. Understanding the contradictions of adolescent development invites us to reconsider teen media use in a new light — as a striving for agency.

Nikhila Natarajan is co-founder of the Teens, Family, and Technology Lab at Rutgers University