Introduction Social media has created opportunities for children to gather social support online (Blackwell et al., 2016; Gonzales, 2017; Jackson, Bailey, & Foucault Welles, 2018; Khasawneh, Rogers, Bertrand, Madathil, & Gramopadhye, 2019; Ponathil, Agnisarman, Khasawneh, Narasimha, & Madathil, 2017). However, social media also has the potential to expose children and adolescents to undesirable behaviors. Research showed that social media can be used to harass, discriminate (Fritz & Gonzales, 2018), dox (Wood, Rose, & Thompson, 2018), and socially disenfranchise children (Page, Wisniewski, Knijnenburg, & Namara, 2018). Other research proposes that social media use might be correlated to the significant increase in suicide rates and depressive symptoms among children and adolescents in the past ten years (Mitchell, Wells, Priebe, & Ybarra, 2014). Evidence based research suggests that suicidal and unwanted behaviors can be promulgated through social contagion effects, which model, normalize, and reinforce self-harming behavior (Hilton, 2017). These harmful behaviors and social contagion effects may occur more frequently through repetitive exposure and modelling via social media, especially when such content goes “viral” (Hilton, 2017). One example of viral self-harming behavior that has generated significant media attention is the Blue Whale Challenge (BWC). The hearsay about this challenge is that individuals at allmore »
This content will become publicly available on April 27, 2023
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.
- Award ID(s):
- 1827700
- Publication Date:
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10353971
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the 2022 ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2022)
- Page Range or eLocation-ID:
- 1 to 14
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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