Maya Shelton-Davies knows her online audience.
Her Facebook friends and Twitter followers aren't that interested in mundane complaints or what she ate for lunch. But a quip about the time she killed the spider on her bedroom wall by shooting a vitamin from her slingshot?
"People thought it was hilarious," said Shelton-Davies, 16, from River Falls, Wis. "I got a bunch of 'likes' on it."
Teenagers are sharing more than ever before on social media. Seventy-seven percent of teens who go online have Facebook accounts, while one in four are on Twitter. As the digital deluge grows, parents everywhere continue to fret about privacy, especially as it concerns their children. But new research shows teens themselves are surprisingly adept at managing the online boundaries between public and private, thanks in part to that age-old adolescent preoccupation with the opinions of others.
"Teens with larger friend networks on Facebook share a wider range of content with a wider range of people, but they are also more active 'reputation managers,' " said Amanda Lenhart, a senior researcher with the Pew Internet Project and co-author of the study "Teens, Social Media and Privacy."
Sixty percent of teens use privacy controls to allow only approved "friends" to see their Facebook profiles. Almost all of those friends — the average Facebook-using teen has 425 — are acquaintances from the real world, not the anonymous online strangers that parents fear. Within those online circles, as in high school hallways, there's pressure for approval from peers.
The findings reveal the diligence with which teens tend to their digital lives.
Fifty-nine percent of teens said they had pruned online profiles by deleting or editing their own posts later. More than half had scrubbed friends' comments from their profiles. Forty-five percent had removed their names from photos in which they'd been tagged by others. Profile pictures are chosen or discarded based on how many "likes" they garner.