Guiding young people’s social media use in school policies: opportunities, risks, moral panics, and imagined futures

Young people’s social media use has long been scrutinised, contested, and the subject of sustained moral panics. Schools play an important role in socialising young people into specific forms of social media use, both in and out of the classroom. In this paper we examine 38 secondary school (‘high school’) policies that seek to govern how social media is used by students in Australia. We examine the themes and issues covered, and the broader discursive construction of social media within these documents. Our analysis reveals both opportunities and risks identified within these documents: from opportunities like social connection, self-expression, citizenship, and ‘digital skills’ through to an extensive focus on supposed ‘risks’ including sexting and child pornography, the consumption of alcohol and other drugs, mental health concerns, teacher-student relationships, and broad concerns about privacy and the persistence of digital disclosures. Narratives about young people’s imagined futures also emerge in these policy documents, centred on risk and proactive reputation management (for schools and individual students), pointing to a hidden curriculum of surveillance where reputational damage is linked to irreversable harm to professional and personal futures.