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During the summer of 2021, we taught a series of lessons on social media literacy during a 6-week summer bridge program designed to prepare students for their first year of community college. Community college students represent nearly 40% of all U.S. undergraduates (AACC, 2022), with nearly 50% of all first-generation college students attending community college (Cataldi et al., 2018). However, community college students are rarely participants in research studies on media or information literacy (Latham et al., 2022), including in this journal. We also specifically focused on social media literacy, a topic not typically addressed in schools (Higdon, 2022), even though young adults are regularly engaging with social media, including as a source for news and information about the world (Anderson & Jiang, 2018; Robb, 2017). This study was designed in part to fill these gaps.

The information literacy practices of adolescents on social media outside of school are worth considering, since adolescents use social media near ubiquitously and must grapple with all types of content they encounter incidentally or intentionally. This scoping review followed the PRISMA Extension for Scoping Reviews (PRISMA-ScR) to examine the extent and nature of scholarship on this topic from the perspective of educational technology and literacy scholarship, as both fields are uniquely poised to collaborate on this interdisciplinary topic. Surprisingly, only four articles fit the scope of our review. The literature found, and not found, revealed several themes. These themes were the imprecise use of keywords across scholarship, use of social media for community support, exposure to incidental information, evidence for different literacy practices on social media, and the need for addressing social media information literacy in school. Opportunities for future work and collaborative research between both fields is also discussed.