by Ava Arvand and Eva Carr
On March 2nd, 2025, about fifty teens filed into UVA’s Alumni Hall, ready to tackle one of the largest challenges facing young people today: Navigating social media and promoting positive mental health experiences in an increasingly digital world.
Thriving Youth in a Digital Environment (TYDE) organized the Hackathon to elevate youth perspective on how teens can better interact with social media and avoid harmful mental health outcomes that some research indicates are associated with social media use. We see leading scholars arguing both that social media is harmful to mental health and that social media can be a positive force in teens’ lives. Given the inconclusive research, perhaps the key to better understanding this pressing issue is asking those most directly affected. Though often overlooked, teens and young adults best know how they interact with social media, and are well-equipped to consider what healthy engagement means.
The TYDE Hackathon welcomed both regional high school students and UVA undergrads, grouping them into small teams to ‘hack’ one of two social media problem areas by coming up with a proposed solution. The two challenges were to a) find a way to reduce negative social comparison or b) promote(/prevent) social (dis)connection. After hours of brainstorming and mocking up novel interventions, the teams got the chance to pitch their ideas to their peers. TYDE is now working with the group to move Hackathon interventions into prototype development.
See 2025 Hackathon Highlights Video
Social Media Challenges
- Negative social comparison
- Social (Dis)Connection
Topic Area 1: NSC
We defined negative social comparison, the first topic area, as comparing yourself to someone else in a way that makes you feel like you’re missing out or not as good as others. These harmful comparisons can lead teens down spirals of negative thinking which hurt their self-esteem and mental health. Online environments increase people’s vulnerability to these negative thoughts because social media often overrepresents people’s strengths while downplaying their weaknesses.
While anyone can engage in harmful comparisons, we tasked each team with narrowing their intervention to tailor to a particular target population. Unsurprisingly, this constriction blossomed into many diverse ideas that enriched the perspectives of all in attendance. Some of the interventions focused explicitly on adolescent girls struggling with their body image, while others broadened their scope to all teens prone to making negative social comparisons. Another group saw the importance of prioritizing prevention over allowing the maladaptive thought patterns behind negative social comparison to perpetuate themselves in the first place. Their intervention empowered new social media users between the ages of 11-15 to recognize posts that put them at risk of making harmful comparisons and personalize their feeds to avoid seeing this content.
Topic Area 2: Social (Dis)Connection
Other teams were tasked with innovating a method to promote positive social connection and prevent disconnection, or negative experiences, on social media. Social media can promote connection by providing a new way to make friends, creating space to share updates with existing friends, strengthening those connections, fostering activism, or any number of ways. Given the tendency for users to only post their best, however, social media can also create negative experiences that leave users feeling worse and more disconnected than they did before getting online.
Teens came up with a fantastic set of ideas, many of them drawing on the idea that there is a need for new platforms that help promote genuine connections based on shared interests and values. One team in particular proposed the idea of a culturally-informed app that tailors to the user’s culture. The proposed app would not only address prospective mental health concerns associated with identifying with a minority culture, for example, but also connect the user with relevant cultural content that promotes feelings of identity-based connection.
Conclusions:
Overall, none of the interventions developed at the Hackathon were single-session. Each intervention integrated itself closely with its users’ current social media use, softly nudging them towards healthier habits. Simultaneously, many interventions involved creating new social media platforms like clean slates to help people develop strong, healthy relationships to their online worlds. Other interventions tackled problems we hadn’t specifically outlined in the instructions for the Hackathon, like excessive screen time, difficulty making professional connections online, and a shortage of psychological resources that are tailored to minority ethnic groups.
The Hackathon made one thing crystal clear: youth know more about what they need from social media than we give them credit for. They deserve a seat at the table beyond being research subjects. If they are armed with reputable knowledge, the sky is the limit for how teens are capable of reshaping the negative aspects of social media. Ultimately, we need to give youth a platform and open our minds to their untapped wisdom.
TYDE Hackathon 2025 Highlights Video
