CRITICAL AWARENESS AND EVERYDAY INFLUENCE IN GREEK ADOLESCENTS’ ACCOUNTS OF SOCIAL MEDIA INFLUENCERS

Аннотация

Research on adolescents and social media influencers often treats critical awareness as a source of protection from persuasion. Adolescents’ own accounts, however, suggest a more complex relationship. This article examines how young people understand and negotiate influencer content while recognising commercial motives, curated self-presentation, algorithmic personalisation, and misinformation. This article presents preliminary findings from three individual interviews and one focus-group discussion involving eight students aged 15–16 at a public upper-secondary school in Attica, Greece. Data were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis, with attention to critical media literacy, authenticity, perceived susceptibility, consumption, body image, and digital self-regulation. Four connected patterns emerged. Participants tended to locate vulnerability among younger or less critical peers while also describing changes in diet, exercise, appearance-related comparison, and selective trust in their own accounts. They recognised influencer content as constructed and commercially shaped, yet continued to use it for information, motivation, and practical guidance. Commercial scepticism functioned as an evaluative resource rather than a basis for automatic rejection, while agency was practiced through feed curation, source checking, consultation with trusted others, and withdrawal from creators whose values participants rejected. The findings show that critical awareness and influence can coexist within adolescents’ accounts. Media literacy therefore emerges as a situated practice of managing influence rather than as immunity from it. The article contributes an adolescent-centred account of negotiated agency within influencer culture and identifies implications for media education grounded in young people’s existing interpretive practices.

Keywords: adolescents, social media influencers, critical media literacy, advertising literacy, algorithmic awareness, negotiated agency