Filming, editing, and posting videos on social media is now a central activity in young people’s social lives. But it’s also a complex, even dangerous, activity, especially for young women. What do they film, what don’t they film, and why? A look back at the findings of a survey.

In an article dated March 12, 2025 , France 3 Normandie reported that several young girls in the Manche department were victims of fake videos, called “  deepfakes  ,” of a “pornographic and erotic” nature.

In France, as in many other countries, activities related to video production, editing, and sharing are playing an increasingly important role in social life. Posting a video on TikTok, Instagram, WhatsApp, or LinkedIn is a popular way to connect with friends or family, promote a professional activity, express one’s creativity, or share a political point of view.

However, the practice of these activities by young people is partly gendered. Without systematically reaching cases as serious as fake videos, it can be said that, for young women, publishing videos, particularly videos in which they appear, is part of a more general learning process of self-presentation that involves norms, challenges, and risks to manage.

In order to better understand these dynamics, we chose to conduct in-depth interviews with 19 young women aged 18 to 21 (with the help of undergraduate students in education sciences at the Institut catholique de Paris-ICP) . Our aim was to understand the meaning given to these practices by a generation massively equipped with smartphones, who began filming and sharing videos often from adolescence and whose consumption of audiovisual content, via Instagram or TikTok, has become a daily activity .

How do they conceive of making videos? Do they produce them themselves? For which social networks? What technical devices (devices, applications) do they use? How did they learn to make and distribute these images? What roles do friends, online tutorials , school and university teaching play in learning these practices?

Filming yourself, a daily practice?

To begin characterizing our sample, let’s point out that all the students surveyed are regular users of social media: they publish content on Instagram (17 out of 19) and TikTok (16 out of 19). They also use YouTube (8 out of 19), Snapchat (7 out of 19), and other applications. These networks are almost exclusively accessed and used via their phones. They repost posts from their friends, artists, or influencers. They also comment, like, and publish texts they write and photos they take.

However, filming and sharing a self-made video is a different, more complex and engaging process. Our first question was therefore to identify the extent to which and with what precautions the respondents shared videos they had filmed themselves.

In the interview, they were asked to describe the last three videos recorded on their smartphone. From the outset, all of the respondents confirmed having at least three videos recently filmed by themselves, and published (with a few exceptions) on one or other of the social networks mentioned. Furthermore, 17 out of 19 respondents described their video sharing practice as “regular,” with 8 out of 19 even claiming to publish videos every day, or even several times a day.

Putting yourself on stage without putting yourself in danger

While the technical dimension of video design does not seem to be perceived by them as problematic, it is the fact that the videos are put online, in a public space that is not, or only slightly, controlled, that can pose difficulties for students – especially if the videos involve self-presentations that could be perceived as putting them in danger.

These young women are gradually and cautiously taking hold of these new freedoms. It is by trial and error that they identify what can be considered private or public. The sharing options of Instagram or TikTok are perceived by users as engaging for themselves but also for their loved ones. Some of the respondents thus claim to have never shared their videos except in private mode, that is, making them visible only to their close circle (in 7 out of 19 cases), while five of them explain having two accounts, one private and the other public, sharing in public mode only content they consider not dangerous (videos of landscapes, concerts, in which they are not identifiable).

These modes of reasoned sharing stem in particular from discussions and negotiations with parents, relatives, and friends. The young women we interviewed thus demonstrate a keen awareness of the dangers that can threaten them through these activities, such as the hijacking of videos, which 2 out of 19 respondents experienced directly. One of them recounts the escalation in which she was imprisoned:

“It was my ex’s new girlfriend who wanted to destroy the image my ex had of me at all costs. So she took photos, she created a fake Instagram account with my first name […] and, from there, she contacted a friend of my ex to send nudes pretending it was me.”

The respondents clearly identify these new methods among the many forms of online harassment to which women are exposed . Fortunately, for the majority of students, creating video content is not limited to these abuses. They say they learn to script and edit their videos, while expressing their creativity using editing or image editing applications. Some even indicate that these activities give them a new power to act  :

“It helps me to have more self-confidence, it helps me to romanticize my daily life a little and it also helps me to continue to be creative.”

A professionalizing perspective

Developing video skills is also considered by some of the respondents with a professionalization objective. This concerns those who are aiming for careers in audiovisual or communications, but also those who are aiming for other types of professions, like this student who would like to become a special needs teacher and who imagines making “preventive videos and explanatory videos, on the different forms of discrimination that children with mental disabilities may encounter. But also explanatory videos: how to help them, how to support them and then even help other special needs educators or other school teachers.”

The production and publishing strategies of these students are thus the subject of a complex, partly self-taught learning process, operating through trial and error, relying on tutorials and the reproduction of popular formats. This learning is also collective, co-constructed with peers, taking into account the reactions and comments generated by the shared videos, including forms of violence that boys of the same age undoubtedly experience in very different ways.

The subtlety evident in the practices of these young students runs counter to the clichés about a generation lacking in reflexivity and guidance when it comes to social media. This observation, however, must be qualified by recalling that digital skills, particularly those related to privacy management, are partly linked to social status and cultural capital.

Author Bios: Laurent Tessier is Professor of Sociology and Virginie Tremion has a MCF in education and is research coordinator at the Lille Institute of Pedagogical Training (IFP) both at the Catholic Institute of Lille (ICL)