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Abstract Phishers exploit the social nature of social media, thereby targeting young adults, who are highly susceptible to phishing. This study focuses on two under-researched factors influencing young adults’ susceptibility to social media phishing: the user’s relation to the message sender and Fear of Missing Out (FoMO). In an online vignette study, 193 young adults were presented with Instagram chat messages from either known or unknown senders, accompanied by varying consequences for not clicking. These ranged from missing an event with no other user (no consequences) to missing an event with one (low) or several other users (high consequences). The analysis focused on intended behaviour and suspicion, while also capturing young adults’ situational fear of missing out on the scenario-based event with the message sender (State FoMO) and their individual Trait FoMO. The results highlight that the user-sender relation is a strong predictor of phishing susceptibility and a crucial contributor to State FoMO. Furthermore, young adults who are high in Trait FoMO exhibited lower suspicion towards phishing attempts. These findings are discussed along with methodological considerations. In addition, strategies to mitigate the identified vulnerabilities are suggested, focusing on areas where social media phishing is most likely to affect young adults.

Abstract Digital competence (DC) has received increased attention in society, politics and research in recent years. A particular emphasis has been placed on the importance of empowering adolescents and young adults to become digitally competent and sovereign adults, and that this should be achieved, for example, with the help of educational learning approaches. To provide an overview of research trends in this field, we conducted a scoping review and critical analysis of relevant literature on 15–25-year-olds’ DC, determining factors and consequences under research, methodological preferences and evaluated intervention strategies. Both descriptive techniques and quantitative classification methods (latent class and latent profile analyses) were used in summarising the state of the art. After screening 3605 scientific articles, two samples were further investigated: 230 articles on young people’s overall DC and a subsample thereof covering 20 articles on intervention studies. There were four major findings: (1) Contrary to wide-spread expectations, the number of relevant publications on adolescents’ DC displayed a flatter increase than the total growth of articles in the field. (2) A latent class analysis over concomitant variables revealed three subgroups of articles addressing study-specific, educational or so-called digital divide variables. Notably, little attention could be observed with respect to developmental aspects, including psychosocial variables, despite their critical importance for this age cohort. (3) A second classification of articles’ research designs and methodological foci yielded three latent profiles: university students’ DC level, secondary research on secondary students and DC as a predictor in university contexts. (4) Though most articles emphasised the importance of empowering young people in a digital world, only a few scientifically examined intervention concepts could be found, and these were extremely heterogeneous. We conclude that research on young people’s DC, especially that related to fostering their digital abilities, should be intensified.