The Implications of Social Media For Adolescent Critical Thinking From an Information and Advertising Literacy Context: A Brief Review

ABSTRACT Social media has evolved over time from the digital platforms that facilitated human connections they initially set out to be, to the extremely popular and influential channels of information exchange they are today, overrun with misinformation, propaganda, and sponsored content. Adolescents are particularly susceptible to the effects of social media, and the relationship between social media and adolescents has been researched heavily in several different contexts such as identity-formation, mental health, and social interactions, to mixed results. This research seeks to understand the effects of social media on adolescents through the lens of information and advertising literacy. This research reviews the existing literature on adolescents’ abilities to identify misinformation and sponsored content on social media, the two measures for critical thinking used in this research. The findings indicate that although adolescents’ critical thinking skills on social media are not activated in most instances, it is a complex issue with several influencing factors, calling for future research in this area.