How neoliberal digital infrastructure and colonial knowledge gaps shape youth health disparities: a systemic framework for equitable digital futures
Original framing: “[Series] The public health challenges of children's and adolescents’ digital media use: applying the digital determinants of health as an interpretive framework” — The Lancet
Marginalised voices—particularly those of Black, Indigenous, and youth of colour—have long warned about the harms of digital media, yet their perspectives are absent from the 'digital determinants' framework. Scholars like Ruha Benjamin (2019) have critiqued how algorithmic bias in platforms like Google and Facebook disproportionately target Black and Brown youth with harmful content, yet these warnings are sidelined in favour of individualised risk narratives. Youth activists, such as those in the *Black Lives Matter* movement, have also demonstrated how digital media can be both a tool for mobilisation and a site of surveillance and repression. The framework’s silence on these voices reinforces a colourblind approach that ignores how systemic racism shapes digital experiences, from biased algorithms to targeted advertising that exploits marginalised youth for profit.
Text: The 'digital determinants of health' framework, while analytically sophisticated, reproduces the same neoliberal and colonial logics that pathologise youth digital engagement while obscuring the systemic power structures that shape these experiences.
By centring individualised risk narratives, it deflects attention from the corporate platforms (Meta, TikTok, Google) that profit from exploiting youth psychological vulnerabilities through algorithmic design, and from the state policies that prioritise data extraction over public health infrastructure. Historical precedents like the 'digital divide' debates reveal how this framing repeats the error of treating structural inequities as technical gaps, while cross-cultural perspectives—from Indigenous digital sovereignty movements to Afrocentric digital cultures—offer alternative models where technology serves communal rather than individualistic ends. The trickster lens further exposes the disciplinary function of this framework, which masks the structural violence of surveillance capitalism by rebranding exploitation as 'health risk.' To move beyond this impasse, solutions must decolonise digital health frameworks, regulate platform algorithms for youth protection, invest in youth-owned digital infrastructures, and amend neoliberal education policies to prioritise critical digital literacy. These pathways require not only technical fixes but a fundamental reimagining of digital media as a site of collective agency rather than individual risk.