Debating pornography and the notion of harm in public discourse: The case of Billie Eilish’s experiences with sexual content online

Young people’s experiences with sexual content online are a regularly featured popular topic in news media, feeding heated ongoing policy and academic debates. Concerns and calls for further regulation and youth’s self-regulation are exacerbated when celebrities and popular public figures share statements and confessions about their own sexual lives at a young age. In this article, we study the discursive conditions of media coverage and the celebrity confessional as narratives of regulation and self-regulation. Using Billie Eilish’s statement about her self-perceived experience of harm from use of pornography during teenage life (13 December 2021), we study how global and national media outlets constructed Eilish’s confession in the light of broader concerns about children’s experiences with such online sexual content. This study enhances our understanding of how adolescents’ experiences of sexual content online is publicly shaped.