Adolescents and the dark side of social media—Law enforcement perspectives

Abstract

Adolescents are the most active user group of social media sites. Due to being in a phase of both biological and psychological development, they may be particularly vulnerable to the darker side of social media, such as its illegal aspects or coordinated information influencing. With this research, we aimed to identify threats Finnish adolescents face on social media from a law-enforcement perspective. To reach this goal, we performed semi-structured interviews with police officers from Finnish preventive measures police units. To identify and structure threats that adolescents face, we employed a twofold analysis. In the first part, we conducted inductive content analysis, which revealed three primary threats: polarization, disinformation, and social media as a pathway to illegal activities. In the second part, we employed the Honeycomb-model of social media functionality as a classificatory device for structuring these threats. Our findings provide explorative insights into the threats social media might present to adolescents from the point of view of the Finnish law-enforcement system.