For the first generation of digital natives, the smartphone was often a gift given without a manual. Young adults today, like 20-year-old advertising student Júlia Teruel, are beginning to articulate the cost of that early, unfettered access. What began as a platform for sharing innocent snapshots of landscapes or friends quickly evolved into a high-stakes arena for social validation and constant comparison.
The lack of parental oversight in the early 2010s created a vacuum filled by increasingly toxic platforms. Teruel recalls the emergence of ThisCrush, a site designed for anonymous feedback that became a conduit for cruelty. At just 12 years old, she was subjected to anonymous comments targeting her appearance — physical critiques that arrived at a time when her self-image was at its most vulnerable. Her account is not exceptional. It belongs to a pattern now surfacing across an entire demographic: the cohort that received smartphones before any cultural consensus existed about what guardrails, if any, should accompany them.
The parental gap and the platform vacuum
The early 2010s represented a peculiar inflection point in the relationship between children and technology. Smartphones had become affordable and ubiquitous, but the parenting frameworks around them had not kept pace. Most adults of that era had themselves grown up without the internet; they lacked both the vocabulary and the instinct to anticipate what unrestricted access might mean for a developing mind. The default posture was permissive — not out of negligence, necessarily, but out of unfamiliarity.
Into that gap stepped a wave of platforms engineered not for safety but for engagement. Anonymous feedback apps like ThisCrush, Ask.fm, and later Sarahah offered teenagers the thrill of unfiltered peer commentary. The architecture of these services — anonymity by default, no moderation to speak of, virality as a feature — made them particularly effective vectors for bullying. The design incentivized volume and provocation; the emotional consequences were externalized entirely onto the user.
It is worth noting that the broader tech industry during this period was still operating under a growth-at-all-costs logic. User acquisition mattered; user wellbeing was, at best, an afterthought. Age verification was nominal. Content moderation was sparse. The concept of "digital wellbeing" — now a standard settings menu on most devices — did not enter mainstream product design until the late 2010s, years after the damage for this cohort had already been absorbed.
Retroactive processing and the question of accountability
What distinguishes the current moment is not the harm itself — research on cyberbullying and adolescent mental health has accumulated steadily for over a decade — but the fact that the affected generation is now old enough to narrate its own experience with analytical distance. These are not children describing distress in real time. They are young adults reconstructing a formative period and identifying, with some precision, where the systems around them failed.
This retroactive reckoning carries implications beyond the personal. It feeds directly into ongoing legislative debates in multiple jurisdictions about age-appropriate design, platform liability, and parental notification requirements. Several countries have moved toward restricting social media access for minors, though enforcement mechanisms remain contested. The testimony of this generation — articulate, specific, and difficult to dismiss — provides a kind of experiential evidence that policymakers have historically lacked.
The tension, however, is unresolved. Parents of the early smartphone era operated without precedent. Platform designers operated without regulation. And the children caught between those two absences are now left to reconcile an experience that was neither entirely anyone's fault nor entirely unavoidable. The question that lingers is not simply who should have done more, but whether the structural incentives of ad-driven social platforms are fundamentally compatible with the developmental needs of adolescents — or whether the two will always exist in friction, regardless of the guardrails imposed after the fact.
With reporting from El País Tecnología.
Source · El País Tecnología
