Social media and digital technology occupy an increasingly important place in the lives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander young people. Online spaces can support connection with family and community, cultural expression, education, creativity, political participation, health information, and peer support. The same environments can also expose young people to racism, cyberbullying, harassment, misinformation, social comparison, sleep disruption, and distress. The central issue is therefore not whether digital technology is inherently beneficial or harmful. Its mental-health effects depend on what young people do online, how they are treated, which platforms they use, how long and when they use them, and whether their digital experiences strengthen or weaken relationships, cultural identity, safety, and control.
This distinction is especially important for Indigenous youth because online life intersects with experiences that are not captured well by general population studies. Australia’s eSafety Commissioner reports that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children use the internet actively for friendship, creative content, news, and discussion of social and political issues. At the same time, they are almost three times more likely than the national average to report offensive comments directed at them because of characteristics such as race, ethnicity, gender, nationality, sexuality, religion, age, or disability. These experiences can affect mental health, reputation, and school performance (eSafety Commissioner, 2023). A balanced analysis of the positive and negative effects of social media must therefore place culture, racism, community, and digital safety at the center.
Connection and Identity
One of the strongest benefits of digital technology is its capacity to connect young people across distance. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities are geographically diverse, and family or kinship networks may extend across cities, regional towns, remote communities, and different Country. Social media, messaging, video calls, and online groups can make it easier to maintain contact when education, work, health services, or other circumstances separate people physically.
Connection has particular significance when it supports cultural continuity. Young people can share language, music, art, stories, community events, and political discussion, follow Indigenous creators, and participate in online spaces where their identities are represented positively. Digital media can therefore challenge the experience of being stereotyped or invisible in mainstream institutions. The eSafety Commissioner’s research found that First Nations children were more likely than the national average to create and post their own music or video content and to use the internet to stay informed and engage with social and political issues (eSafety Commissioner, 2023).
Online communities can also support help-seeking. Young people who are reluctant to approach a professional face to face may first search for information, use a text-based service, watch another person describe a similar experience, or speak anonymously. Digital mental-health services can reduce some barriers associated with distance, embarrassment, transport, or service availability. However, access does not guarantee that information is accurate or culturally safe. Services designed without Indigenous participation may fail to reflect language, family structures, community relationships, or experiences of racism and colonization.
Creativity is another positive pathway. Producing music, video, art, gaming content, or educational material can provide competence and social recognition. Young people are not simply passive consumers of technology; they use platforms to make things, teach others, document community life, and participate in public conversations. These activities may support confidence when they occur in respectful environments.
The quality of connection matters more than raw screen time. Two young people may spend the same number of hours online but have very different experiences. One may use the time to talk with cousins, complete schoolwork, create videos, and access support. Another may spend the same period being harassed, comparing appearance, or compulsively scrolling late at night. Research on adolescent digital media increasingly cautions against interpreting total use time as a sufficient measure of psychological effect (Odgers & Jensen, 2020; Orben, 2020).
Digital Harms
Racism is one of the most important risks for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander users. Online environments can reproduce and amplify prejudice through comments, memes, impersonation, coordinated harassment, and algorithmic circulation. Harm may be intensified because abusive material can be public, repeated, shared rapidly, and visible at any hour. Racial harassment also differs from ordinary disagreement because it attacks identity and belonging rather than only an opinion.
Cyberbullying can produce similar problems. Repeated humiliation, exclusion, threats, rumor spreading, image sharing, and harassment can affect anxiety, sleep, concentration, school engagement, and willingness to participate online. Australia’s 2024–2025 Keeping Kids Safe Online survey found high exposure to multiple forms of online harm among children generally, including cyberbullying, online hate, sexual harassment, monitoring, grooming-type behavior, and image-based abuse (eSafety Commissioner, 2026a). The figures should not be applied automatically to Indigenous youth aged up to 35, but they demonstrate that harmful online experiences are common enough to require active prevention.
Social comparison can also affect wellbeing. Image-based platforms often display selected and edited versions of other people’s appearance, relationships, travel, possessions, and success. For some users, repeated comparison can intensify dissatisfaction or feelings of inadequacy. The effect is not uniform. Individuals with pre-existing anxiety, depression, body-image concerns, or social insecurity may be more vulnerable, and the type of content viewed matters.
Sleep is another mechanism through which digital use can affect mental health. Late-night messaging, notifications, gaming, or scrolling can delay sleep and increase nighttime interruption. Poor sleep is associated with mood disturbance, impaired concentration, and reduced emotional regulation. The relevant intervention is therefore not simply “less technology” but attention to bedtime routines, notification settings, device location, and the reasons a young person remains online late.
Digital platforms can also expose users to misinformation about mental health, substances, self-diagnosis, diet, or treatment. Peer stories may reduce stigma, but personal testimony does not substitute for clinical assessment. Content creators can speak confidently without relevant qualifications, while algorithms may repeatedly recommend similar content once a user engages with it. Digital literacy should include the ability to distinguish lived experience, advertising, opinion, and evidence-based information.
At the same time, excessive restriction can create harms of its own if it cuts young people off from community, cultural content, or support. Australia introduced a social media minimum-age framework that took effect in December 2025, requiring age-restricted platforms to take reasonable steps to prevent Australians under sixteen from holding accounts. eSafety’s First Nations resources emphasize family discussion, cultural relevance, and shared learning rather than treating young people themselves as offenders (eSafety Commissioner, 2026b). The policy environment therefore reinforces the need to examine platform responsibility alongside individual behavior.
Research Design
A study of Indigenous youth should not begin by assuming that the population is homogeneous. The original age range of fifteen to thirty-five years covers adolescence, emerging adulthood, and established adulthood, stages that differ substantially in education, employment, family responsibility, and social-media use. A stronger design would either narrow the age range or analyze age groups separately.
A mixed-methods design is better suited to the research question than a survey alone. Quantitative measures can identify patterns in use, sleep, distress, harassment, social connection, and help-seeking. Qualitative interviews or yarning methods can explain what those patterns mean in cultural and community context. Numbers may show that frequent users report higher distress, but interviews may reveal whether the mechanism involves racism, loneliness, crisis support, school pressure, community connection, or another factor.
Sampling should include urban, regional, and remote participants where feasible and should avoid assuming that “Indigenous youth” can be represented by one convenient sample. Recruitment through Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisations, schools, universities, youth services, community organizations, and online channels may improve reach, but community partnerships should be established before recruitment begins.
The variables should also be more precise than “time spent on social media.” Useful exposure measures include platform type, active versus passive use, late-night use, cultural-content participation, direct messaging, cyberbullying, racial abuse, unwanted sexual contact, political engagement, online friendship, and access to mental-health information. Outcome measures can include psychological distress, social and emotional wellbeing, loneliness, sleep, school or work functioning, perceived cultural connection, and help-seeking.
Cross-sectional data cannot establish that social media caused a mental-health outcome. Distressed young people may use social media differently, and online experiences may simultaneously affect distress. A longitudinal design that follows participants over time would provide stronger evidence about direction and change. Researchers should also control for relevant factors such as age, gender, socioeconomic circumstances, location, offline discrimination, existing mental-health conditions, family support, and major life events.
Data analysis should match the questions. Descriptive statistics can characterize patterns of use and exposure. Regression models can test associations while adjusting for confounders. Interaction terms may examine whether the relationship between harmful online experiences and distress differs according to cultural connection or social support. Qualitative thematic analysis can identify experiences that structured survey items missed. The goal is not to produce one average “effect” but to identify conditions under which online life becomes protective or harmful.
Indigenous Research Ethics
Research involving Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people requires more than ordinary privacy and consent procedures. The Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies emphasizes Indigenous self-determination, leadership, impact and value, sustainability and accountability in its Code of Ethics. Research should therefore be developed with communities rather than merely conducted on them (AIATSIS, 2020) (Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, 2020).
Community governance should shape the research question, recruitment, interpretation, data management, and publication. Researchers should be transparent about who owns data, where it will be stored, who can access it, and how findings will be returned to participating communities. Results should not stigmatize Indigenous young people by presenting digital harms as evidence of individual weakness while ignoring racism, platform design, service access, or structural disadvantage.
Consent needs to be meaningful and age appropriate. For minors, parental or guardian processes must comply with ethics requirements while also respecting the young person’s understanding and voice. Participants should know that they may withdraw and that declining participation will not affect services. Researchers also need a plan for disclosures involving abuse, self-harm risk, threats, or illegal content so that confidentiality limits are explained before participation.
Language is another ethical issue. Survey items developed for non-Indigenous populations may not measure social and emotional wellbeing accurately across cultural contexts. Instruments should be selected or adapted carefully and, where possible, validated for the population being studied. Community advisors and Indigenous researchers can help identify wording that is respectful and interpretable.
Benefits should be tangible. A study that documents online racism but returns no practical resource risks becoming extractive. Research can support culturally relevant digital-literacy resources, community workshops, platform reporting pathways, mental-health referral information, or advocacy for safer platform design. In 2025, eSafety released First Nations online-safety resources developed with community input, illustrating how digital-safety interventions can be designed around culturally appropriate family discussion rather than generic messaging (Australian Government, 2025).
Balanced Prevention
The most defensible response to social media and mental health is neither unrestricted use nor a blanket assumption that digital technology is damaging. Families, communities, schools, services, and platforms all influence outcomes. Young people need practical skills for blocking, reporting, privacy settings, recognizing scams, responding to racist abuse, verifying information, and seeking help. Parents and carers benefit from understanding the platforms young people actually use rather than relying only on surveillance.
Platforms also carry responsibility. Safety cannot depend entirely on a young person blocking each new abusive account. Reporting systems should be accessible, harassment policies should be enforced consistently, recommender systems should not intensify harmful material without safeguards, and users should have meaningful privacy and control options. Regulation can create minimum obligations, while independent research is needed to evaluate whether those obligations reduce harm in practice.
Health services should recognize that online experience can be clinically relevant. Asking a young person about sleep, cyberbullying, racist harassment, unwanted contact, or online support may reveal important contributors to distress. The conversation should remain nonjudgmental because a clinician who simply orders a young person to “get off social media” may lose an opportunity to understand where support and harm are actually occurring.
For Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander youth, digital environments can be places of culture, creativity, advocacy, friendship, and help-seeking as well as racism and harassment. Mental-health research should preserve that complexity. The central question is not how to eliminate digital life, but how to strengthen the conditions that make it culturally affirming, socially supportive, and safe while reducing the conditions that turn online participation into another source of discrimination and distress.
References
Australian Government. (2025). Help for First Nations Kids to Stay Safe and Deadly Online.
Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies. (2020). AIATSIS Code of Ethics for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Research.
eSafety Commissioner. (2023). Online Experiences of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children and Their Parents and Caregivers.
eSafety Commissioner. (2026a). Digital Use and Risk: Online Platform Engagement Among Children Aged 10 to 15.
eSafety Commissioner. (2026b). Helping First Nations Kids and Young People Stay Safe Online.
Odgers, C. L., & Jensen, M. R. (2020). Annual Research Review: Adolescent mental health in the digital age. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 61(3), 336–348.
Orben, A. (2020). Teenagers, screens and social media: A narrative review of reviews and key studies. Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology, 55, 407–414.
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