For Me or Not for Me? The Ease With Which Teens Navigate Accurate and Inaccurate Personalized Social Media Content

Social media apps present personalized content to users. Such content is often described as “for you,” raising questions about the relationship between users’ sense of “self” and the “you” that is represented. Answering such questions is pressing in the case of teen users whose identities are still forming. Thus we ask, “What do teens think about the relationship between personalized content and their sense of self?” We interviewed teens aged 13 to 17 (n = 15) about their experiences with personalized content on social media. Participants so routinely saw themselves accurately reflected in personalized content that they noted the occasional inaccuracy with surprise, while simply scrolling past it. Our findings point to: the normalization of data doubles in the form of personalized content; and teens’ indifference to inaccuracies presented by such data doubles.