South East Community College: Youth Social Media ‘Produsers’ and the Apps Opening the Floodgates to Non-consensual Sexual Images
摘要
This chapter looks at South East Community College, a highly diverse inner city school, in special measures, with high levels of deprivation, whose number of students receiving free school meals far exceed the national average. We outline our methodological process of working in groups with young people to explore their everyday use of social media, how they produce, consume, and share sexual images or ‘selfies’, and how they understand and respond to harmful digital sexual content and interactions. The chapter theorises youth as social media ‘produsers’ – who both produce and use and consume images in a complex interplay that can be risky. We review the main platform affordances of Snapchat which open youth to risk. Snapchat relies upon game-like functions for users to achieve high interaction scores, which increase time spent on the app and expands the network of contacts. To increase Snapscores some teens turn off privacy settings, receiving a steady stream of unwanted sexual content largely from bots and adult predators, but also experiencing peer-to-peer harassment from boys they know. We show young people are mostly dealing with the consequences of navigating harassing and abusive dynamics online without adequate adult support at home or school.