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Description: Empirical research has shown that adolescent social media users aim to convey the ‘best’ version of the self by constructing and uploading very curated and selective posts, called the social media positivity bias (Bell, 2019; Throuvala et al., 2019; Authors, 2021a; Yau & Reich, 2019). Such idealized self-presentations are not really authentic as they do not reflect adolescents true selves (Throuvala et al., 2019). Research on both offline and online self-presentation processes showed that inauthentic self-expressions can harm adolescents’ self-esteem whereas the opposite occurs for authentic self-expressions (Twomey & O’Reilly, 2017; Wood et al., 2008). Yet, the relation between participation in the positivity bias and self-esteem remains unclear when within-person processes are considered. As such, the first aim of the current study is to investigate whether an adolescent’s increased participation in the positivity bias relates to a decreased self-esteem over time. Furthermore, the form that social media self-presentations take might be determined by an adolescent’s dispositional and situational factors (Gil-Or et al., 2015). One important variable to examine in this context is social media literacy (Authors, 2021a). It is expected that an adolescent with higher levels of social media literacy might participate to a lesser extent in the positivity bias as she/he is aware of the negative implications of this trend (Bailey et al., 2020; Authors, 2021). Yet, empirical research supporting this assumption is lacking. Therefore, a second aim of the paper is to investigate the within-person relation between an adolescent’s social media literacy and participation in the positivity bias over time. Finally, an opposite direction for the relation between participation in the positivity bias and self-esteem on the one hand, and social media literacy and participation in the positivity bias on the other hand might also be plausible. It could be that preexisting self-esteem levels inform an adolescent’s participation in the positivity bias over time whereby low self-esteem could stimulate engagement in such contrived self-presentation processes (Gil-Or et al., 2015). Increased participation in the positivity bias may then, in turn, decrease critical reflections about this bias, and thus social media literacy levels may become less elaborated. Yet, empirical research supporting this reasoning is scarce. Therefore, a third and final aim of the current study is to investigate the reciprocity of the hypothesized relations.