Does social media literacy mitigate impacts of social media in adolescents?

A four lesson, universal, social media literacy intervention for early adolescents, will be delivered by research personnel, face-to-face, in grade 7 and 8 classrooms. Each lesson will be of 45-50 minutes long and one lesson will be conducted in each of four consecutive weeks. The first social media literacy lesson will include classroom activities to explore motives for social media posting to inform critical social media use. These activities will include examination of postings on social media including advertising and celebrity posts. In the second lesson, the realism of social media images and the effect of viewing images on how students feel about themselves will be explored. In the third lesson,students will find social media images with positive and negative feedback and examine emotions associated with feedback and motives for different types of feedback. They will create a non-appearance focused social media profile. In the final lesson, students will work in small group to create a social media campaign using the social media literacy skills they have gained. To ensure treatment fidelity, staff delivering the intervention will be trained and a sample of lessons will be recorded.