Abstract: Social media are central to young people’s social worlds, but this digital landscape enables the algorithmically targeted marketing of legal, psychoactive products (alcohol, vape products). Routine exposure to vape and alcohol product marketing normalises the use of these products, increases their consumption, and affects health and well-being across the life-course. The purposive design, production and marketing of unhealthy products that stimulate habitual consumption and pleasure to maximise profit has been called ‘limbic capitalism’. Social media platforms intensify limbic capitalism. They are designed to generate, analyse and apply vast amounts of personalised data in an effort to tune flows of online content that capture users’ time and attention, influencing their affects, moods, emotions and desires in order to increase profits. For most young people in Western societies, social media are accessed routinely through everyday digital devices, and are central to their socialising, identities, leisure practices and engagement in civic life. This talk will provide an overview of a bicultural, multidisciplinary, mixed-methods project that examines young people’s digital worlds, including their self-reported social media use, exposure to unhealthy commodity marketing online and how this varies across social groups. Our findings show that young people actively appropriate social media for their own ends but must simultaneously navigate a highly commercialised landscape full of alcohol and vape product marketing. They also identify inequities in exposure to vape and alcohol marketing online, and highlight ways in which young people resist limbic capitalism processes on social media.

Biography: Professor Antonia Lyons holds the Hugh Green Foundation Chair in Addiction Research at the University of Auckland, where she is the Director of the Centre for Addiction Research. Antonia brings a health psychology perspective to her work in multidisciplinary teams. Her research has focused on understanding the social and embodied contexts of behaviours related to health and wellbeing, insight that can be used to help improve outcomes. Much of her work has explored drinking cultures and alcohol consumption at different life stages and in different contexts, with a focus on digital cultures and digital alcohol marketing. Antonia has published over 100 articles and 20 book chapters.  She co-authored the text  Health Psychology: A Critical Introduction and co-edited the books Youth drinking cultures in a digital world, Qualitative Research in Clinical and Health Psychology, and the Routledge International Handbook of Critical Issues in Health and Illness.