For One Group of Teenagers, Social Media Seems a Clear Net Benefit

The surgeon general’s warning Tuesday about social media’s “profound risk of harm” to young people included a significant qualification. For some of them, the warning said, social media can be beneficial to health in important ways.

For one group in particular — the growing share of young people who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer — social media can be a lifeline, researchers and teenagers say. Especially for those growing up in unwelcoming families or communities, social media often provides a sense of identity and belonging at a crucial age, much earlier than for many L.G.B.T.Q. people in previous generations.

“It’s a lifeline for folks to receive information and to really see that they are not alone, and there are so many people like them,” said Jessica Fish, who studies L.G.B.T.Q. youth and their families at the University of Maryland School of Public Health. “They can feel some sense of connection, and realize there is a place for them.”

Growing up in a sheltered Mormon and Christian community in Kansas, Cassius O’Brien-Stiner, 19, said he had little exposure to L.G.B.T.Q. identities: “I was pretty unaware that even being gay was a thing.”

Then Mr. O’Brien-Stiner, who is transgender, started using Facebook and YouTube as an adolescent, and eventually found an online group for queer people. He has had some negative and even dangerous experiences online, he said, including cyberbullying. But it was also where he first learned the word “trans.”

“It was weird, feeling completely alone and then, suddenly, there were thousands of people who felt the same way I felt, on a spectrum,” said Mr. O’Brien-Stiner, who now attends the University of Kansas. “It was both eye-opening and really comforting.”