What happens when teens confide in strangers online

Lennon Torres was 13 when she received her first iPhone. She raced to download the apps all her friends used: Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat, eager to experience social media alongside her peers. 

But Torres, now 25, wasn’t the average 13-year-old. She was also a reality show contestant who later regularly guest starred on the show Dance Moms. As she built her social media profile, fans of the show had began showing up. Torres, who is transgender and was out as an openly gay teen prior to her transition, received supportive and appreciative messages from queer youth, as well as death threats from strangers.

Then there were others who appeared to be adult men, who had a different agenda. Torres says they urged her to sign onto gay chat sites in order to “explore” her identity. 

Though Torres’ parents embraced her queerness, she still felt disconnected from the broader LGBTQ+ community, which made the idea of joining a gay chat site compelling. All it took for Torres to join was falsely checking a box verifying her age as 18. What happened next forced Lennon to realize what it’s like to be sexually exploited as a young queer person. 

Occasionally she chatted with someone who felt like a friend. But more frequently she encountered adult men who, in one-on-one conversations, showered her with kindness and compliments. Curious about sex education, Torres asked questions about things she wasn’t learning in school or discussing with her parents.  

Then the men would start revealing their true intentions, Torres says. Some pressured her to perform sexual acts on camera. When she resisted, they threatened to publish screenshots of her. Lennon often complied with their demands, assuming that doing so was the safest, least harmful path forward.

“I was so close to the tragedy of sextortion,” Torres says, remarking on instances of teens taking their own life in the midst of being threatened by a bad actor or sexual predator who has explicit images of them. “Being that close to it sends chills down my spine.”

Once she started dating, at around 15, Torres stopped frequenting the chat sites. She’s now the campaign and community manager for the Heat Initiative, an organization that challenges technology businesses to combat child sexual abuse on their platforms. 

Though Torres’ experience may seem unique given her large social media following and high profile, she is no outlier. 

It’s now normal for teens to befriend strangers online, share explicit imagery of themselves, and develop a deep bond with someone they’ve never met in person. This reality may bewilder their parents, who came of age when “stranger danger” cast suspicion on anyone remotely sketchy—online or off. 

But what adults often fail to understand is that in the past few decades, we inadvertently built a complex web of risk that exposes young people to grooming and exploitation at a massive scale. These days, it doesn’t take much for your child to get stuck in it and become someone’s victim. 

The scale of online youth exploitation

For more than a year, I’ve been trying to understand how this risk became so pervasive. It had began while reporting an investigative series on the dangers of using emotional support platforms, including the popular platform 7 Cups. I was shocked by how frequently teens cultivate deep relationships with strangers online—and stunned by how often their trust is weaponized for abuse.  

First, the data tell a simple, if horrifying, story about online grooming and exploitation. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children had began tracking reports of online enticement of children for sexual acts, a broad category of digital exploitation that includes sextortion, in 1998. 

That year, the center’s CyberTipline received 707 reports. Clearly, once predators had access to youth online, they were going to take advantage of it. The problem has grown exponentially in recent years, as a result of financial sextortion. In 2023, the tipline yielded 186,819 reports, from individuals and electronic service providers, an increase of more than 300 percent since just 2021. This figure is likely a vast undercounting.

Of course, without social media platforms to facilitate these relationships, they wouldn’t exist at the same scale. Take Instagram, for example, where Torres received private messages more than a decade ago urging her to join gay chat sites. It was only last week, after years of pleading from online safety advocates, that Instagram’s parent company Meta finally made teen accounts private by default and limited private messaging for those accounts.  

Torres believes tech businesses should still be regulated by the government, but acknowledges that Instagram’s new policy is a small victory. There remains a vast online network by which predators can easily communicate with and groom children, largely undeterred by weak safety measures.

Teens appear to underestimate this danger—or accept it as part of their online lives. A good portion of teens surveyed in 2023 said they told a virtual contact something they’d never shared with anyone before, according to research conducted by Thorn, a nonprofit organization that builds technology to defend children from sexual abuse. 

Thorn has also found that sharing nudes is now viewed as normal by more than a third of teens. Some give this material to someone they believed to be an adult; many surveyed see online relationships with adults as normal. A new survey of 1,000 teens who disclosed sexual abuse revealed the extent to which social media is used to prey on youth. Of the participants who weren’t related to their assailant, 12 percent said that social media facilitated the assault.

Threat of a “social shark attack”

As the internet evolved, the social conditions under which children and teens forged meaningful relationships changed dramatically, too, according to the youth advocates and experts in youth mental health, online safety, and sexual exploitation that I’ve interviewed. 

Loneliness and anxiety surged, perhaps related to widespread device use. Parents helicoptered and snowplowed their children into an arguably fragile state of existence, depriving them of critical opportunities to make confidence-building choices. Caregivers also appear to vastly overestimate the emotional support their teen receives, according to survey data recently published by the National Center for Health Statistics.  

Meanwhile, with influencers constantly in their ear, marketing just about every lifestyle to them 24/7, some teens grow up feeling like a composite of what they’ve seen online, rather than their own person with a strong sense of self. 

Some teens know exactly who they are but aren’t accepted at home or in their community because of their sexuality or gender identity, and turn to the internet for affirmation. Torres, however, has argued persuasively that this is no salve for LGBTQ+ youth, and can actually lead to more harm.  

Social media also lets teens know when they’ve been excluded, or how their life seemingly doesn’t measure up to their peers’. Sometimes social media is used to bully them, like when they’re booted from a Snapchat group or become the subject of a gossip “tea” account. Their social ties can feel delicate, if not more performative than meaningful. After all, who can they really trust? 

Making and sustaining friendships under these circumstances isn’t easy. Consider that, just like their parents, teens are also distracted by devices. Eye contact and small talk isn’t necessary when everyone in the classroom or cafeteria is on their phone. 

Liz Feld is CEO of the nonprofit organization RADical Hope, which runs a four-week wellness program on college campuses designed to help young adults build resilience and strengthen their connections. Arizona State University, New York University, and Mercer University are among the participants. 

“These young adults, they actually don’t know how to communicate.”

Students are brought together in small peer-led groups for skill-building activities and discussion. When they peel off for an “active listening exercise” that lasts three minutes, participants commonly remark on how long the exchange feels. 

“These young adults, they actually don’t know how to communicate,” she says. “They are not used to sitting face-to-face and making eye contact without any distraction.” 

The buzzing anxiety may also have to do with what the Stanford psychologist Jamil Zaki describes as fear of “social shark attacks.” Gruesome run-ins with sharks are statistically rare, but the imagery is hard to forget, making them more memorable and heightening our perception of risk. 

A “social shark attack” works similarly. Imagine a social interaction that goes terribly wrong. Now replay that in your mind as the natural result of saying hello to a new friend, asking someone out on a date, or seeing an acquaintance for the first time after you shared something vulnerable about yourself. If all you can see is blood in the water, you’re likely to take fewer chances. 

Given how so much of their social lives look nothing like what adolescents have traditionally experienced, it’s no wonder teens think they might have better luck with relationships online. 

“Young people are taking enormous risks because they feel safe with strangers,” says Zaki, author of Hope for Cynics: The Surprising Science of Human Goodness. “They’re basically risk averse with people in their lives, and maybe overly risk seeking with people who are anonymous.”

The illusion of control

Teens are also in a precarious developmental period of their lives. They’re eager to separate from their parents and feel mature, both of which can lead to riskier behavior, says Amy Corbett, a therapist with a private practice in Somerville, Mass. 

Corbett has worked with numerous teen victims of online sexual exploitation. Some of them had past histories of trauma, like child abuse. Others came from supportive, loving households. Many of them felt safer connecting with a stranger online because they could present themselves at their own pace, in ways that felt freeing, even if they weren’t being entirely authentic.  

One teen girl experienced significant anxiety and spent considerable time on video game platforms, which led to social connections. At first, it felt empowering for the girl. But then one relationship with an adult male escalated from texting, talking, and exchanging information into “something really awful,” Corbett says. 

“A teenager can think that they’re in control of the situation for a lot longer than they actually are.”

Carrie Goldberg, a lawyer who has represented victims of child sexual exploitation, says predators often reinforce the idea that a teen they’re talking to is very mature, a form of validation they crave. 

As the teen shares more about themselves, which can include secrets as deep as a history of abuse or suicidal ideation, the predator will also divulge their own secrets. This creates a false perception for the teen that the bond the two share is unique and unusual, Goldberg says.   

Taking small leaps of faith 

The sad reality for teens and young adults is that they actually yearn for meaningful in-person relationships with their peers. 

Zaki, director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab, noticed that after students returned to campus following the initial phase of the Covid-19 pandemic, they complained how difficult it was to meet people. He had a hunch about why. 

In 2022, his lab surveyed thousands of students and asked about how much they cared about their peers, enjoyed helping others, and had wanted to connect with people. A second set of questions asked about how the students viewed the average Stanford student. 

The self-assessments were overwhelmingly positive. The vast majority of respondents had wanted to make new friends and demonstrated empathy toward others. But their perception of the average student was harsh: “unfriendly, judgemental, and callous.” 

Zaki suspects that fear of social shark attacks, among other factors, holds young people back. They simply aren’t testing their assumptions about what will happen if they reach out to others. As an antidote, he recommends being less risky with strangers on the internet and taking more risks in everyday social life. This doesn’t mean telling someone you just met your deepest secrets, but instead taking small leaps of faith and “calculated chances” on other people. 

In many ways, this is what RADical Hope helps to facilitate in its college wellness program, RADical Health. Melissa White, a student-athlete at Middlebury College, volunteered as a student guide last year. She helped facilitate conversations about stress management, self-care, and decision-making. 

Unsurprisingly, students were reluctant to share at first. But White realized that once she made the first vulnerable move, and the group understood the discussions would be confidential, others quickly followed suit. Students were relieved to learn they weren’t the only ones who felt anxious, confused, or lost at school. 

The difference between this and cursory online socializing with peers, where people might share their interests or highlights, felt clear to White. 

“It creates this community where people are relating to each other rather than just this interpersonal connection,” White said of the RADical Health model. 

There’s no easy way to solve the problem of teens going online for fulfilling relationships and paying an unimaginable price for doing so. But it’s obvious that they need both aggressive protection from predators online and safe in-person opportunities to connect to their peers. 

“Wait for the better online future that I know is coming, but it’s just not here yet.”

They also need parents who won’t punish them if they do become a victim of online exploitation. Regardless of whether they lie about their age, disclose family secrets, or betray trust, every expert I spoke to had a singular message for parents of teens: Talk to them openly and often about online risks; let them know you’ll protect them if something bad happens; and never blame them if it one day it does.

Torres recommends that young teens in search of a meaningful relationship or confidant lean on trusted peers and adults instead of going online. She hopes that collective efforts to regulate technology businesses and social media platforms will ultimately make the internet a much safer place for youth to connect with each other. 

“Wait for the better online future that I know is coming, but it’s just not here yet,” Torres says. 

If you are a child being sexually exploited online, or you know a child who is being sexually exploited online, or you witnessed exploitation of a child occur online, you can report it to the CyberTipline, which is operated by the National Center for Missing Exploited & Children.