Becoming a “critical” social media user: Young women’s discursive negotiations of responsibility within public health discourses

This article explores how young women who are regular social media (SM) users position themselves in relation to public health discourses that frame SM as both a health risk and a site requiring critical self-regulation. Drawing on critical discursive psychology and health psychology, we examine how 18 young women construct three subject positions – the guilty user, the experienced user, and the reflexive user – when speaking about their SM practices. These positions were strongly shaped by healthiest, postfeminist and neoliberal logics that individualize responsibility and moralize digital engagement. We argue that these three subject positions constitute a new normative ideal of a critically aware SM user. Our analysis highlights how criticality itself can become a mode of neoliberal governance, offering young women discursive tools to manage contradictions between systemic critique and personal responsibility.