This research really makes me wonder if teens fully appreciate the potential consequences of "...doing self disclosure to an audience of hundreds" ( or in some cases, thousands) on social media.
The teenage and young adult years are a time of tremendous growth in a person's social and intellectual development. This involves exploring new concepts, trying on different identities, exploring different political and religious viewpoints, etc. Basically, growing and developing as a person involves making mistakes, miscalculations, and doing things that you may not even consider doing months or years down the road. (For the record, adults do this as well but not usually with the same frequency as teens).
The concern with social media is that once a tweet, photo, Facebook post, YouTube video, etc is shared, it's out there and may be virtually impossible delete should the person change their mind at a later time, particularly if the content has been shared or rebloged on another social media profile. The issue of having content you would rather not be associated with on social media is not just an issue in terms of a person's social life, it could affect future education or employment prospects, as employers and educational institutions are increasingly investigating the social media activities of potential students/employees. Content posted several years ago could really come back to hurt you! How many of us can honestly say we are the same person we were five or ten years ago? How many of us remember what content we put online during that time? How many of us can recall what we posted online a year or even a month ago?
It's also interesting to note that according to this article, many teens have never met a decent number of their online friends in real life. This is particularly alarming when these "friends" number in the hundreds or thousands, and teens don't think twice about sharing personal information, such as location, cell phone numbers, etc with what many older people would basically consider strangers.