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Adolescents who spend a massive amount of time on social media platforms (Van Driel et al., 2019), can get constantly exposed to others’ seemingly perfect lives and appearances (Bell, 2019; Verduyn et al., 2020), also called the social media positivity bias (Reinecke & Trepte, 2014; Authors, 2020a). The affective responses that the social media positivity bias may exert are diverse and contradictive in terms of well-being. On the one hand, being exposed to positively biased social media content may evoke negative response states, such as envy, amongst others (e.g., Bell, 2019; Lin & Utz, 2015). On the other hand, users can react positively to such content types, for instance by being inspired (e.g., Meier et al., 2020). Currently, it is unclear for whom and how often such positive and negative response states occur, but scholars hinted at the role of social media literacy to determine this (Authors, 2020a). Yet, research supporting this assumption is overall lacking. Therefore, a first aim is to explore the moderating role of social media literacy in the relations between exposure to positive social media content and positive versus negative social media induced response states, respectively. As social comparison processes often underlie the relations under scrutiny (Verduyn et al., 2020), a second aim is to examine how adolescents’ social media literacy interacts with the social comparison process that may take place when being exposed to the social media positivity bias. A final aim will be to distinguish between within and between person relations in the associations between exposure to the positivity bias, social comparison and positive vs negative social media induced response states by adopting a random intercept cross-lagged panel model (RI-CLPM) (Hamaker et al., 2015). Too often, studies in the social media/well-;being domain merely relied on a between-person perspective (Orben et al., 2019). Yet, social media effects are very likely to occur within individuals and thus not distinguishing between within-person and between-person relations may result in erroneous conclusions (Coyne et al., 2020; Orben et al., 2019). Note that the RI-CLPM will only be used when the analyses show there is sufficient reason to extract the between from the within relations (see below).

Individuals typically present their best possible selves on social media (Reinecke & Trepte, 2014). As such, social media are loaded with idealized portrayals in which others express their social (e.g., spending time with friends; Utz et al., 2012), romantic (e.g., happy couple pictures; Papp et al., 2012), academic (e.g., graduation picture; Kolek & Saunders, 2008), and appearance (e.g., thin body; Ringrose, 2011) successes. Previous studies have argued that such portrayals negatively relate to adolescents’ mental well-being, as they induce feelings of envy and pressure to comply with one (or multiple) of these ideals (Lewallen & Behm-Morawitz, 2016; Vandenbosch & Eggermont, 2020). To explain such negative feelings, we draw on principles of the self-discrepancy theory (Higgins, 1987). Within this theory, Higgins (1987) differentiates several domains of the self, namely the actual (i.e., characteristics an individual currently possesses), ideal (i.e., characteristics which an individual aspires to possess), and ought self (i.e., characteristics which an individual thinks s/he should possess). When the actual self does not match with another domain of the self, a discrepancy occurs (Higgins, 1987). Adolescents who are continuously exposed to successful portrayals (i.e., success cues) on social media might eventually experience a discrepancy between their actual and ought self. More specifically, they become aware that at the moment (i.e., actual self) they are not as successful as they are supposed to be according to the successful portrayals of others on social media (i.e., ought self). They assume that they need to be just as successful as others. Furthermore, the role of internal locus of control as a potential moderator in these relationships will be explored. Media literature highlights that users are differently affected by (social) media, depending on their personal background and characteristics (e.g., Valkenburg & Peter, 2013). Internal locus of control refers to the extent to which individuals believe certain outcomes are the result of their own actions and abilities. As such, adolescents who have a high internal locus of control presumably think that they are personally responsible for their success and blame themselves when they fail to achieve such success (Vandenbosch & Eggermont, 2020). Locus of control has been suggested to be a key moderator in social media relationships which evoke identity discrepancies within users (Vandenbosch & Eggermont, 2020). Therefore, the current longitudinal study will examine whether adolescents with a higher internal locus suffer more from feelings of self-discrepancy when their exposure to success cues on social media is higher, compared to adolescents with lower internal locus of control.

Empirical research has shown that adolescent social media users aim to convey the ‘best’ version of the self by constructing and uploading very curated and selective posts, called the social media positivity bias (Bell, 2019; Throuvala et al., 2019; Authors, 2021a; Yau & Reich, 2019). Such idealized self-presentations are not really authentic as they do not reflect adolescents true selves (Throuvala et al., 2019). Research on both offline and online self-presentation processes showed that inauthentic self-expressions can harm adolescents’ self-esteem whereas the opposite occurs for authentic self-expressions (Twomey & O’Reilly, 2017; Wood et al., 2008). Yet, the relation between participation in the positivity bias and self-esteem remains unclear when within-person processes are considered. As such, the first aim of the current study is to investigate whether an adolescent’s increased participation in the positivity bias relates to a decreased self-esteem over time. Furthermore, the form that social media self-presentations take might be determined by an adolescent’s dispositional and situational factors (Gil-Or et al., 2015). One important variable to examine in this context is social media literacy (Authors, 2021a). It is expected that an adolescent with higher levels of social media literacy might participate to a lesser extent in the positivity bias as she/he is aware of the negative implications of this trend (Bailey et al., 2020; Authors, 2021). Yet, empirical research supporting this assumption is lacking. Therefore, a second aim of the paper is to investigate the within-person relation between an adolescent’s social media literacy and participation in the positivity bias over time. Finally, an opposite direction for the relation between participation in the positivity bias and self-esteem on the one hand, and social media literacy and participation in the positivity bias on the other hand might also be plausible. It could be that preexisting self-esteem levels inform an adolescent’s participation in the positivity bias over time whereby low self-esteem could stimulate engagement in such contrived self-presentation processes (Gil-Or et al., 2015). Increased participation in the positivity bias may then, in turn, decrease critical reflections about this bias, and thus social media literacy levels may become less elaborated. Yet, empirical research supporting this reasoning is scarce. Therefore, a third and final aim of the current study is to investigate the reciprocity of the hypothesized relations.

Social media usage has increasingly been hold responsible for adolescents’ body dissatisfaction as these platforms are known to perpetuate the sociocultural appearance ideals of being thin for women and being muscular for men (Kim, 2020). Yet, most empirical research examining the link between social media use and body dissatisfaction relies on cross-sectional and experimental research designs, despite the call of multiple review articles in the field for more longitudinal research (i.e., Faelens et al., 2021; Holland & Tiggemann, 2016; Ryding & Kuss, 2020). In addition, many studies considered aggregate social media use measures (e.g., time spend) to investigate relations with body dissatisfaction (Ryding & Kuss, 2020). Such an approach is not very valuable as social media use is not unitary and features such as liking, commenting, and posting sets social media use apart from traditional media use (Kim, 2020; Ryding & Kuss, 2020). It is also important to adopt more content-specific social media measures, for instance, by specifically considering appearance focused social media content (Valkenburg, 2021). Together, the current study will aim to investigate the within-person relations between adolescents’ different interactions with appearance focused social media use (i.e., exposure to, liking, positively commenting on and posting such content) and body dissatisfaction by use of a large scale three-wave longitudinal panel design. In doing so, a sample of both adolescent boys and girls will be used.