About half of teenagers’ social media posts refer to drinking, sex, or violence, according to Megan Moreno, an assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. That discovery, which was reported earlier this year, left Moreno wondering if all that chatter was reality or trash talk. She’s still working on answering that question, but she has found out this: Kids do think that what they see on social media sites is real, and the younger they are, the more they believe it. That’s important, because teenagers are powerfully influenced by the behavior of their peers.
“There is good data that if kids think their friends are drinking, they’re more likely to drink,” Moreno says. “The perception of normal is powerful.”
Moreno doesn’t yet have hard data on how much of the teenage drinking on social media sites is real. She thinks some of it is, some is nonsense, and some is a “gesture of intention”—that is, a teen may be thinking of getting into the drinking scene and is testing the waters by putting up pictures or writing about it.
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