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https://doi.org/10.62836/jissh.v3i3.0033
Yao, C. (2026). The Dual Impact of Digital Technology on Adolescents’ Legal Awareness: Opportunities, Risks, and Educational Implications. Journal of Integrated Social Sciences and Humanities, 3(3), 0033. https://doi.org/10.62836/jissh.v3i3.0033
Volume 3, Issue 3, 2026

The Dual Impact of Digital Technology on Adolescents’ Legal Awareness: Opportunities, Risks, and Educational Implications

Digital technology has been deeply integrated into adolescents’ daily life, providing them with new channels for legal socialization but also exposing them to new legal risks at the same time. In this article, we conduct a systematic review of interdisciplinary literature to examine the twofold effect of digital technology on adolescents’ legal awareness, including legal knowledge, rights consciousness, obligation consciousness, compliance dispositions and legal trust/procedural justice. The conclusion from this review is that digital tools offer potential to expand legal knowledge, enable participatory legal learing and enhance rights consciousness using online civic discussion. Algorithmic curation, cyberbullying, privacy violations, exposure to online crime, digital inequality and divided attention might work in a direction to undermine trust in the law, normalize deviant behavior and promote unequal legal socialization. These effects are mediated by developmental stage, family and school mediation, platform design, and digital literacy. The article positions digital technology as not inherently good or bad, and its legal socialization outcomes are conditioned by the uses and the surrounding institutional environment. It rounds out with stakeholder-specific implications for education, platforms, policy, and parents.

digital technology adolescents legal awareness legal socialization digital citizenship digital risks

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Supporting Agencies

  1. Funding: This research received no external funding.