Co-authored by Reimaging RSE founder, Emily Setty, and principal investigator on the Influencer Culture project, Robyn Muir. Find out more about Robyn and follow her on LinkedIn.
Over the past year, Emily and Robyn, alongside co-author Rosie Macpherson, have published three papers exploring girls’ experiences of influencer culture. These papers examine how girls understand influence, what they find helpful or unhelpful in adults’ responses, and how educators, parents and researchers might respond in ways that better reflect the realities of girls’ lives. Although the research focuses on influencer culture, the questions it raises extend wider. They speak to a broader challenge in how we conceptualise young people’s relationships with digital media and, perhaps more importantly, how we support them to navigate an increasingly complex world.
Each paper addressed a different aspect of that challenge. The first explored how girls understood influence itself, demonstrating that their accounts resisted simplistic notions of passive consumption or manipulation. The second examined what girls wanted from adults, revealing a preference for relationships characterised by trust, curiosity and emotional understanding over approaches centred primarily on warning or protection. The third turned the lens back on adults, arguing that supporting girls requires forms of co-reflection that encourage us to examine our own assumptions alongside theirs. As a collection, these papers suggest that the question is not simply how young people should understand and engage with digital media, but how adults understand and engage with young people. These questions are all the more pertinent at the current time, given the evolving policy and regulatory landscape that seeks to restrict young people’s ability to be online.
Public debate often begins from a relatively straightforward assumption. If young people make choices that concern adults, the problem is understood as one of insufficient knowledge, limited critical awareness or poor judgement. Educational responses to young people’s digital lives and online engagements, including on social media, therefore tend to focus on strengthening media literacy by helping young people identify misinformation, recognise commercial influence or understand digital risks. These are valuable aims. Our research suggests, however, that they explain only part of what young people are navigating.
One of the most striking features of our conversations with girls aged 9–15 was the sophistication of their thinking. They recognised the commercial logic underpinning influencer culture, questioned claims to authenticity and reflected critically on unrealistic beauty standards and idealised lifestyles. They demonstrated considerable awareness of how influencer culture could shape expectations around appearance, relationships and success. Rather than revealing a lack of critical thinking, the discussions illustrated thoughtful engagement with the cultural, commercial and social forces shaping their digital environments.
At the same time, that awareness did not necessarily diminish the emotional or social significance of those same influences.
Girls described recognising that particular images were unrealistic while continuing to compare themselves against them. They questioned influencers’ authenticity while still enjoying their content. They understood that online ideals were carefully curated while continuing to find aspects of those ideals desirable. These accounts were not evidence that girls had failed to think critically. Rather, they reflected something fundamental about human experience: understanding something intellectually does not necessarily change how we feel about it, nor does it remove the social meanings attached to it. Put simply, two things can be true at the same time. Holding space for multitudes, rather than mutually exclusive binaries, is therefore, important.
This observation extends beyond influencer culture. Across our wider research on young people’s digital lives at Reimagining RSE – including pornography education, image-based sexual abuse and relationships – we repeatedly encounter what might be described as a cognitive-emotional gap. Young people often possess sophisticated knowledge about the issues adults are concerned about, yet their experiences continue to be shaped by friendship, belonging, attraction, aspiration, identity and curiosity. Human judgement rarely emerges from detached rational calculation. We make sense of our lives through emotions, relationships and social contexts, while simultaneously reflecting critically upon them.
Educational responses sometimes underestimate this complexity by assuming that greater awareness will naturally produce different choices. Yet decades of research across psychology, education and public health suggest that knowledge alone rarely determines behaviour. People routinely understand that something is unhealthy, unrealistic or problematic while continuing to find it emotionally meaningful or socially valuable. Young people’s engagement with influencer culture illustrates this particularly clearly. Their accounts suggest that the challenge is not simply helping them recognise problematic content; it requires creating opportunities to explore why that content can remain compelling despite recognising its limitations.
Thinking in these terms also changes the questions we ask. Rather than asking why young people continue to engage with content they already know to be problematic, we might ask what needs, relationships or aspirations that content is helping them negotiate. The girls in our study were navigating belonging, identity, recognition and aspirations for the future. Influencer culture became one of the environments through which those wider developmental and social questions were explored, sometimes through engagement with their peers. Understanding these experiences therefore requires us to consider not only what young people know, but also what matters to them, what they hope for and the tensions they are trying to resolve.
This perspective also helps explain why many girls felt existing educational responses did not always meet their needs. Information about filters, advertising or unrealistic body ideals was generally welcomed, but participants often felt conversations ended before addressing the emotional realities of living alongside those ideals. Recognising that an image has been edited does not necessarily reduce the experience of comparing yourself to it. Understanding commercial intent does not prevent admiration for the confidence, status or belonging that particular lifestyles appear to represent. Education therefore needs to move beyond transmitting knowledge towards supporting young people in making sense of their own experiences.
The second paper in the project highlighted this particularly clearly through girls’ reflections on adult support. Participants described feeling caught between adults who minimised their concerns and adults who responded with alarm or attempts to remove the problem altogether. Neither response left much room for conversation. Instead, girls valued adults who were prepared to listen, remain curious and acknowledge uncertainty without rushing to judgement. They wanted opportunities to think aloud, to articulate conflicting feelings and to explore experiences that were often emotionally complicated rather than neatly resolved.
Running through all three papers is a question of whose knowledge is recognised and valued. Discussions about young people’s digital lives often become polarised between assumptions that adults lack the knowledge to understand rapidly changing digital cultures and assumptions that young people, despite their greater familiarity with these environments, lack the judgement to navigate them well. Adults may therefore feel uncertain about their role, while young people’s experiences are interpreted through the lens of risk or vulnerability. Our findings suggest a rather different picture. The girls understood their own emotional worlds, the pressures they experienced and the contradictions they navigated with considerable insight. What was sometimes missing was not awareness on their part, but recognition on ours. In education, this is sometimes described as epistemic justice: taking seriously people’s capacity to understand and interpret their own experiences. Put simply, it means recognising that young people are not mere recipients of adult expertise; they are experts in the realities of growing up in a world that adults themselves did not experience.
Recognising young people as knowers does not mean accepting every judgement uncritically or abandoning adult responsibility. Rather, it changes the starting point for education. Instead of assuming that support begins with correcting deficits, it begins with understanding lived experience. It creates opportunities for dialogue in which knowledge is constructed together through curiosity, reflection and mutual respect.
This is also why our third paper argues that adults have their own work to do. Supporting young people cannot rest solely on encouraging their reflexivity. It also requires adults to reflect on the assumptions we bring about social media, gender, risk, influence and what we consider to be healthy or problematic choices. Our own experiences, anxieties and cultural norms shape the conversations we have with young people, often in ways we do not immediately recognise. Co-reflection therefore becomes an educational practice not only for children and young people, but for adults as well.
For us, these ideas resonate closely with the principles underpinning Reimagining RSE. While education should equip young people with knowledge, it needs also to create spaces where uncertainty, contradiction and complexity can be explored thoughtfully rather than resolved prematurely. Thought about in this way, education becomes less concerned with delivering definitive answers and more concerned with supporting people to develop judgement through reflection, dialogue and relationships.
Ultimately, the three papers tell a story that extends well beyond influencer culture. They suggest that meaningful support begins not by assuming young people lack knowledge, but by recognising that knowledge is only one element of how people navigate their lives. Young people do not simply need help recognising risk or identifying influence. They need opportunities to examine how knowledge, emotion, relationships and social expectations intersect within their everyday experiences. Perhaps the most important lesson the girls taught us is that moving beyond media literacy is not about abandoning critical awareness. It is about recognising that understanding the world and living within it are different things, and that education has an important role in helping young people negotiate the space between the two.
To learn more about the project and access resources produced for girls, their parents and carers, and educators, visit the project website.