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The COVID-19 pandemic and related public health efforts limiting in-person social interactions present unique challenges to adolescents. Social media, which is widely used by adolescents, presents an opportunity to counteract these challenges and promote adolescent health and public health activism. However, public health organizations and officials underuse social media to communicate with adolescents. Using well-established risk communication strategies and insights from adolescent development and human-computer interaction literature, we identify current efforts and gaps, and propose recommendations to advance the use of social media risk communication for adolescents during the COVID-19 pandemic and future disasters.

Disaster communications are frequently included as an area of improvement in the majority of incident after action reports. One segment of the population that is overlooked or intentionally excluded from messaging constructs is adolescents and transitional aged youth. Social media, the preferred mechanism of this population, has the capacity to both educate as well as misinform. Thoughtful and intentional utilization of social media channels for adolescent audiences can convey facts and motivation for appropriate community action when mindfully incorporated into a crisis communication plan by emergency managers. Increasing methods of accurately conveying life-safety issues during the COVID-19 pandemic and its increasing variants must be done correctly and timely.

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UNSTRUCTURED The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic and related public health efforts limiting in-person social interactions present unique challenges to adolescents. Social media, which is widely used by adolescents, presents an opportunity to counteract these challenges and promote adolescent health and public health activism. However, public health organizations and officials underutilize social media to communicate with adolescents. Using well-established risk communication strategies, we identify current efforts and gaps, and propose recommendations to advance the use of social media risk communication for adolescents during the COVID-19 pandemic and future disasters.