With the goal of widespread peer acceptance, social media sites can be used to gain familiarity amongst your peers and later realize your place amongst the group. It is not until the ages of 15-18 that teens will realize the importance of meaningful interpersonal connections with a select few friends rather than peer groups as a whole. During this time, teens are supposed to find more value in the quality of relationships rather than the quantity, friendships should become more and more intimate, sharing more secrets and feelings with a smaller number of people (McNeely, Blanchard, 2009). With most social media sites catering to a wide range of friends, from the best of friends people you may have never even met in person or are barely acquaintances with, deep and meaningful friendship is simply not put in the forefront of sites like Facebook or Twitter. That is not to say these sites do not allow one-on-one conversation, I simply mean to say that posting pictures, liking photos, or any of the other most common uses for social media sites simply appeal to your range of friends and not only your best friends. This means that some teens who are over dependent on social media sites as their main source of social communication will have trouble progressing into the phase of meaningful friendship that will bring lasting consequences for the rest of their lives. .
Social media sites not only interfere with the developmental process in the long term but they can also harm their cognitive recognition of what "friendship" means to them (Cleemput, 2010). On sites such as Myspace or Facebook, the list of friends and friends of friends is potentially infinite; although this may seem like a relatively positive change in how teens communicate, it can lead to the blurring of the line between friend and acquaintance (Subrahmanyam, Greenfield, 2009). This infinite social circle has a litany of possible negative effects on adolescent social lives, but all of those can significantly affect how a teen defines "friendship".