From Egalitarian To Exclusionary: Profiling Youth Acceptance of Discrimination in the Digital Age

Adolescence is a formative period for the development of prejudice, yet little is known about how digital environments and gendered socialization jointly shape attitudes toward discrimination. Participants were 762 Belgian secondary-school students (M = 17.03, SD = 0.89; 58% female). Using these survey data, this study examined whether adolescents found unequal treatment acceptable across six grounds: ethnicity, religious denomination, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability, and age. Latent Profile Analysis estimated separately by gender revealed four attitudinal constellations: Low discriminators (strongly egalitarian), Moderate discriminators (ambivalent), Selective discriminators (tolerant of gender- and sexuality-based discrimination only), and Broad discriminators (high acceptance across all grounds). Although the profile structure for boys and girls was similar, their prevalence differed: a larger share of girls (70%) than boys (54%) fell into the Low discrimination group, while boys were more often represented in the Moderate group, which also showed stronger exclusionary attitudes. Multinomial logit models indicated that social media use was strongly linked with group membership. For boys, higher levels of use were associated with an increased likelihood of exclusion. For girls, however, the platform context played a greater role: use of Instagram and TikTok was linked to lower levels of prejudice, whereas use of Facebook and Reddit was linked to higher levels. Experiences of discrimination further heightened the risk of exclusion, particularly among boys. Together, the results show that a focus on within-gender diversity and platform-specific use yields a clearer picture of how gender and digital context are associated with adolescents’ acceptance of discrimination.