Young adults’ social network practices and the development of their media literacy competences: a quantitative study

ABSTRACT Social networks are used by millions of people. These platforms are very popular with young audiences but also raise a growing number of questions: What are young people doing on social networks? What do they read and produce? Do they engage in a variety of activities? Are they media literate in relation to these social networks, and how do they develop these competences? This article focuses on the relationships between young adults’ social network practices and the development of their media literacy competences. Based on responses from 350 Belgian young adults, we identify profiles based on frequency and diversity of their practices. These profiles correlate with different levels of media literacy. We observe no relationship between frequency of participants’ reception practices (reviewing their newsfeed, reading posts, conducting in-depth research) and the development of their media literacy competences. However, we observe that the more young adults diversify these reception practices, the better their media literacy competences are. Conversely, and surprisingly, the more often they produce media content and the more they diversify these production practices (creating and sharing posts), the less media literate they appear to be.