What the media missed about teens and phones

• Researchers at Notre Dame studied news coverage of teens using their phones and social media.
• They found the news stories lacked one key perspective: teen users themselves.
• And nearly all the stories focused on the potential harms — ignoring any positives.

As a parent, I'm consumed with worry about the potential harms of the so-called "phone-based childhood." Sometimes, I wish I could put my own kids in a Faraday cage.

Still, as a tech journalist who has covered this topic, I know it's more complicated than just phone+social media = bad.

So, I was intrigued when I came across a study by researchers at Notre Dame that found media narratives on the issue tended to be one-sided. In other words, the stories often didn't include potential positives.

It's important to look at how news organizations might be shaping public opinion when it comes to kids and phones. Headlines drive discussions in Congress, local government, and on the playground. Right now, the resounding takeaway seems to be: Screens and social media are terrible for kids.

To analyze media coverage, the researchers searched 10 large news outlets for articles from 2020 to 2024 that mentioned the Kids Online Safety Act or other search terms around youth online safety. They found that all of the coverage focused on potential harms, like issues with mental health, self-harm, sextortion, or screen addiction.)

They also found that articles tended to focus on restrictive methods as solutions — taking away phones completely or school phone bans, for example.

This doesn't surprise me. Sure, there's more coverage of the harms because, frankly, there are harms! For example, a recent Pew report found that four out of 10 teens felt they spent too much time on their phones, and the US surgeon general suggested adding warning labels to social media for young people. Even TikTok discussed internal research showing how quickly teens could become addicted to its platform.

But what struck me most about the Notre Dame study was a third finding: that a majority of media coverage the researchers analyzed failed to include youth voices. In other words, the articles about teens often didn't quote any teens.

Stories often exclude teen voices

Karla Badillo-Urquiola, an assistant professor of computer science and engineering at Notre Dame, and Ozioma Oguine, a doctoral student focusing on human and computer interaction, spoke to me about the paper.

Oguine said media outlets should strive for more teen perspectives.

Having written some of these stories myself, I'm guilty of this, especially when an article is about something specific in the news related to social platforms or lawmakers. But I do appreciate getting to actually hear from teens, like my colleague Kelly Burch, who recently interviewed high schoolers about the TikTok ban.

Oguine said their research suggested that online safety was being viewed from a "one-size-fits-all" kind of bucket. It also largely didn't include perspectives out of the mainstream, like from gay or minority youth.

"I think news outlets might probably want to take a look at, 'How can we include marginalized perspectives into this conversation? What are the lived experiences of youth from marginalized backgrounds, and are there any benefits of online technologies to them?'"

As a result, the main narrative in the news about the dangers of phones and teens can lack nuance.

This doesn't mean Badillo-Urquiola doesn't believe that social media or phones can be harmful (she does). But their assessment of more than 150 news articles uncovered something surprising: They were all about the risks and harms, not potential benefits, of online experiences. (Their research, which focused on news items about policy, didn't include some positive stories like how social media can be a "lifeline" for LGBTQ+ youth.)

One thing the researchers observed was that coverage mainly focused on controlling screen time — taking away phones in school, for example, instead of other more holistic approaches.

"A lot of the work that I am doing is sort of how do we move beyond parental mediation strategies to look at more community-based practices and creating more social and ecological supports for these youth," said Badillo-Urquiola. "That's what we wanted to look at: Is any of that coming out in any of these articles? For the most part, it's not, right? It's still very parent-focused."

This is a theme I've heard before — that putting the onus on parents to be in charge of their kids' online safety isn't fair to parents, some of whom might not have the time or knowledge to be able to navigate a bunch of in-app controls and settings.

"The idea isn't to take away parents out of the equation," she said. "The idea is to actually give more support to parents so that they are able to make decisions."

As a journalist who's written about this stuff, I found myself slightly defensive. It's not always our job to suggest solutions to the problems we're reporting on, after all — and the idea that the media only writes about "bad news" is overly simplistic.

But there is something here — the public understanding of the topic of teens and social media is somewhere between an unprecedented public health crisis and a fake moral panic, depending on your viewpoint. This study certainly will be in my mind when thinking about how to frame future coverage.