Abstract
<p>Concerns about the decline in adolescents’ well-being have grown in recent years, with social media often identified as one of the main contributors. However, research findings remain inconclusive. One possible explanation is that social media use is often treated as a uniform experience, although adolescents engage in different activities and encounter diverse forms of content. To address these concerns, we used an intensive longitudinal Experience Sampling Method (ESM) design capturing adolescents’ momentary social media experiences across a range of activities and content types. Across 14 days, 157 adolescents aged 15 to 19 years (67.5% girls, Mage = 16.99) completed four daily assessments of their momentary well-being, social media activities, and the characteristics of the content they posted and viewed. Dynamic Structural Equation Modeling (DSEM) revealed concurrent, but no lagged, within-person associations. Adolescents who engaged in public posting reported higher self-esteem, and those who viewed content reported higher positive affect and higher loneliness. When considering the characteristics of viewed content, adolescents who perceived content as more positive reported higher positive affect and self-esteem, as well as lower loneliness. Associations with content mode were more limited: adolescents who viewed photo-based content reported higher self-esteem than those viewing text-based content, whereas no associations emerged for video content. In sum, understanding the consequences of social media for adolescent well-being requires moving beyond simple measures of use and considering both the activities adolescents engage in and the characteristics of the content they encounter.</p>