Middleboro Review 2: Your teenager is still figuring out who they are. Big Tech’s algorithms act like they already know.

Sunday, August 30, 2026

Your teenager is still figuring out who they are. Big Tech’s algorithms act like they already know.

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Your teenager is still figuring out who they are. Big Tech’s algorithms act like they already know.

August 30, 2026

By Elise Rapoza

My child doesn't have a smartphone or use social media. Until they turned 13, I thought that meant they were protected from its influence. I was wrong.

I’m watching the culture of social media reach my child secondhand, both as a mother and the wife of a public school teacher. Online vocabulary travels offline, including increasingly precise categories young people use to understand differences in attention, personality, sexuality, gender, politics, and mental health.

Some of this can be enormously valuable. A teenager with undiagnosed autism can discover an explanation for their differences. A gay or transgender teenager can discover that others feel the same way. But social media doesn’t simply provide access to information. It continuously classifies our behavior to predict what to show us next, including content we never asked for.

Last week's landmark multistate settlement with Meta will limit how much time teenagers can spend on its platforms, but it largely leaves personalized feeds intact, requiring only that Meta give parents and teens the option to turn them off.

Massachusetts should go further by passing S.3175, “An Act Protecting Children from Addictive Social Media Feeds.” The bill would disable certain algorithmically personalized feeds for minors across all social media platforms, while still allowing teenagers to search for content, follow creators and groups, and otherwise tell the platform what they want to see. In other words, it would preserve teenagers' ability to explore while limiting the platform's ability to direct that exploration.

Algorithmically personalized feeds can be addictive by design, but there is another reason to think twice about them: They may also influence how teenagers come to understand themselves.

Developmental psychologists have long studied “social essentialism” —our tendency to see categories as revealing deep and meaningful differences between people. Research with children has found that categorical language can make characteristics seem more intrinsic and categories more rigid, as though they represent distinct kinds of people. Put simply, a label can make an attribute feel less like something about you and more like something you are. This is especially consequential during adolescence, when forming a sense of self is a central developmental task.

That should give us pause in an information environment built around classification. Online platforms infer demographic characteristics, interests, and other attributes to decide what content and advertising to put in front of us.