Updated June 15, 2026 at 3:28 PM EDT
Last week, a Los Angeles Superior Court judge denied motions by Instagram parent company Meta and YouTube parent company Alphabet for a new trial. The decision upheld a landmark $6-million jury verdict that found the tech giants liable for intentionally designing addictive platforms that harm children and young people’s mental health.
Riana Elyse Anderson, a clinical psychologist and associate professor at Columbia University’s School of Social Work focuses her work around youth mental health, family systems, and how environmental stressors — including digital exposure — shape development. Anderson researches the disproportionate mental health impact of social media on youth of color, particularly Black youth, and what families are navigating in real time.
6 questions with Riana Elyse Anderson
What have you learned about how social media especially harms Black children and teens?
“Social media has already had a really robust data set in the past few years of what happens to young people. They report more depression. They say they’re more lonely. They have more comparisons. But now we have a different beast on our hands.
“We have this mechanism that allows young people to stay in these worlds, that pull from those same spaces where those young people were just experiencing high-end discrimination. So these worlds might even report to them, ‘Here are some of the things that you should do based on what the internet says,’ which might be full of discrimination, might be full of bias. So it’s really adding a compounded stressor for these young people who are seeking solutions to things like discrimination or racism themselves.”
Can you explain what indirect online harm is?
“I really want to uplift the work of Brendesha Tynes at [University of Southern California]. She’s looking at what young people are being exposed to. In some cases, they’re not trying to find these pieces of news or some of these comments but they’re being exposed to it anyway, underneath someone’s post in a comment or someone is commenting at them or they’re just simply scrolling and the algorithm is showing them something that they think they might be interested in.
“That’s where young people are seeing other people potentially being harmed or other news stories that are demonstrating some sort of discrimination, some sort of harm that hasn’t happened to them. So we think of that as vicarious or indirect, and some of those harms are actually showing more psychological distress for young people than if it happened to themselves directly.”
Are you saying that indirect exposure to racism, harassment and online violence could be as harmful or even more damaging than personal attacks from a cyberbully?
“Absolutely. Some of the studies that have been conducted by my colleagues and myself are showing what ends up happening when that discrimination is not to you directly. And some of the thoughts that we have about, well, ‘Why on earth would this be the case? Why would vicarious discrimination be greater than a direct form or why would indirect be more than direct?’
“I think when young people are thinking about themselves being harmed by discrimination, they are able to say, ‘Well, I did something. There was something wrong with me.’ So we internalize a lot of discriminatory actions. We think that we have done something wrong. When you see it showing up for someone else and not just one time, but multiple times a day, multiple times a week, multiple times in the news on your phone, it’s everywhere. You’re starting to make sense of it. It is no longer just about me. This is really systemic. And more importantly, what on earth could I, as an individual do about this?”
You recently wrote a piece for HuffPost saying that the way teens are now using artificial intelligence chat bots should terrify us. Why?
“I was privileged to talk with some young people, and they were sharing with me what they do when they wake up. And they were talking about how, if they had a question, that they would go to [ChatGPT] first. And that didn’t surprise me, given how much they used chat or other forms of AI in their everyday life.
“But when I asked more specifically, ‘OK, let’s say you were struggling in this area of your life, or let’s say you had really negative thoughts, where would you go?’ And they kept saying that [ChatGPT] was the place that they would go to unpack some of these things. It made me realize, what I was indicating before, what AI is doing, pulling from not just the scientific literature that says there are disparities or that there are challenges that young people might face, but they’re also pulling from the greater internet that has a really challenging and negative algorithm that has bias baked into it.
“So practically, if a young person says, you know, “I’m a Black kid. I’m living in these environments and I’m asking for help on how to navigate that. What might you think?’ It may pull from an already biased internet base and say, ‘Here are some of the things that you might do,’ including some of these more fatal outcomes that we’ve seen. If we know there are disparities in Black children dying by suicide, for example, AI might pull from what’s going on online and make a suggestion that’s just indicating what that disparity is.”
What is your advice to Black and Brown teens and their parents and caregivers?
“I know that [ChatGPT] is a first place that young people might go. And again, that’s what that story was all about, that young people are saying, ‘That’s the first place that we go.’ And so it would be silly for me to just say, ‘Don’t do that,’ right? Because we know that’s what young people are doing.
“So that requires parents, loved ones to really ask, ‘What is it that you’re reaching out to [ChatGPT] about today? What are some of the things that you input on your app or online? What are the things you’re asking about?, and how can we, as a family or as a community, support you offline? What are the things that we can do with you?’
“And for young people to understand, all right, if you are going to use it, there are limitations. And we really want to be here in real life to support you for your needs.”
At least 35 states and Washington, D.C., have enacted policies or bans on cell phones during the day. Does that make a difference?
“It is insufficient to completely ban. It’s really about what are the behaviors that we’re going to engage in together. So really, we should be taking out our phones, doing some practice-based work together and demonstrating the processes and behavior you can use on the phone.”
This interview was edited for clarity.
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Jenna Griffiths produced and edited this interview for broadcast with Catherine Welch. Griffiths also produced it for the web.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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