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Title: Understanding the Digital Lives of Youth: Analyzing Media Shared within Safe Versus Unsafe Private Conversations on Instagram
We collected Instagram Direct Messages (DMs) from 100 adolescents and young adults (ages 13-21) who then flagged their own conversations as safe or unsafe. We performed a mixed-method analysis of the media files shared privately in these conversations to gain human-centered insights into the risky interactions experienced by youth. Unsafe conversations ranged from unwanted sexual solicitations to mental health related concerns, and images shared in unsafe conversations tended to be of people and convey negative emotions, while those shared in regular conversations more often conveyed positive emotions and contained objects. Further, unsafe conversations were significantly shorter, suggesting that youth disengaged when they felt unsafe. Our work uncovers salient characteristics of safe and unsafe media shared in private conversations and provides the foundation to develop automated systems for online risk detection and mitigation.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1827700 1844881 2333207
NSF-PAR ID:
10353971
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ; ; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Proceedings of the 2022 ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2022)
Page Range / eLocation ID:
1 to 14
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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