Title: From Ignoring Strangers’ Solicitations to Mutual Sexting with Friends: Understanding Youth’s Online Sexual Risks in Instagram Private Conversations
Online sexual risks pose a serious and frequent threat to adolescents’ online safety. While significant work is done within the HCI community to understand teens’ sexual experiences through public posts, we extend their research by qualitatively analyzing 156 private Instagram conversations flagged by 58 adolescents to understand the characteristics of sexual risks faced with strangers, acquaintances, and friends. We found that youth are often victimized by strangers through sexual solicitation/harassment as well as sexual spamming via text and visual media, which is often ignored by them. In contrast, adolescents’ played mixed roles with acquaintances, as they were often victims of sexual harassment, but sometimes engaged in sexting, or interacted by rejecting sexual requests from acquaintances. Lastly, adolescents were never recipients of sexual risks with their friends, as they mostly mutually participated in sexting or sexual spamming. Based on these results, we provide our insights and recommendations for future researchers. Trigger Warning: This paper contains explicit language and anonymized private sexual messages. Reader discretion advised. more »« less
Razi, Afsaneh; Badillo-Urquiola, Karla; Wisniewski, Pamela J.
(, Let’s Talk about Sext: How Teens Seek Support and Advice for Online Sexual Interactions)
We conducted a thematic content analysis of 4,180 posts by adolescents (ages 12-17) on an online peer support mental health forum to understand what and how adolescents talk about their online sexual interactions. Youth used the platform to seek support (83%), connect with others (15%), and give advice (5%) about sexting, their sexual orientation, sexual abuse, and explicit content. Females often received unwanted nudes from strangers and struggled with how to turn down sexting requests from people they knew. Meanwhile, others who sought support complained that they received unwanted sexual solicitations while doing so—to the point that adolescents gave advice to one another on which users to stay away from. Our research provides insight into the online sexual experiences of adolescents and how they seek support around these issues. We discuss how to design peer-based social media platforms to support the well-being and safety of youth.
Agha, Zainab; Badillo-Urquiola, Karla; Wisniewski, Pamela J.
(, Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction)
Adolescent online safety researchers have emphasized the importance of moving beyond restrictive and privacy invasive approaches to online safety, towards resilience-based approaches for empowering teens to deal with online risks independently. Unfortunately, many of the existing online safety interventions are focused on parental mediation and not contextualized to teens' personal experiences online; thus, they do not effectively cater to the unique needs of teens. To better understand how we might design online safety interventions that help teens deal with online risks, as well as when and how to intervene, we must include teens as partners in the design process and equip them with the skills needed to contribute equally to the design process. As such, we conducted User Experience (UX) bootcamps with 21 teens (ages 13-17) to first teach them important UX design skills using industry standard tools, so they could create storyboards for unsafe online interactions commonly experienced by teens and high-fidelity, interactive prototypes for dealing with these situations. Based on their storyboards, teens often encountered information breaches and sexual risks with strangers, as well as cyberbullying from acquaintances or friends. While teens often blocked or reported strangers, they struggled with responding to risks from friends or acquaintances, seeking advice from others on the best action to take. Importantly, teens did not find any of the existing ways for responding to these risks to be effective in keeping them safe. When asked to create their own design-based interventions, teens frequently envisioned nudges that occurred in real-time. Interestingly, teens more often designed for risk prevention (rather than risk coping) by focusing on nudging the risk perpetrator (rather than the victim) to rethink their actions, block harmful actions from occurring, or penalizing perpetrators for inappropriate behavior to prevent it from happening again in the future. Teens also designed personalized sensitivity filters to provide teens the ability to manage content they wanted to see online. Some teens also designed personalized nudges, so that teens could receive intelligent, guided advice from the platform that would help them know how to handle online risks themselves without intervention from their parents. Our findings highlight how teens want to address online risks at the root by putting the onus of risk prevention on those who perpetrate them - rather than on the victim. Our work is the first to leverage co-design with teens to develop novel online safety interventions that advocate for a paradigm shift from youth risk protection to promoting good digital citizenship.
Alsoubai, Ashwaq; Song, Jihye; Razi, Afsaneh; Naher, Nurun; De Choudhury, Munmun; Wisniewski, Pamela J.
(, Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction)
Sexual exploration is a natural part of adolescent development; yet, unmediated internet access has enabled teens to engage in a wider variety of potentially riskier sexual interactions than previous generations, from normatively appropriate sexual interactions to sexually abusive situations. Teens have turned to online peer support platforms to disclose and seek support about these experiences. Therefore, we analyzed posts (N=45,955) made by adolescents (ages 13--17) on an online peer support platform to deeply examine their online sexual risk experiences. By applying a mixed methods approach, we 1) accurately (average of AUC = 0.90) identified posts that contained teen disclosures about online sexual risk experiences and classified the posts based on level of consent (i.e., consensual, non-consensual, sexual abuse) and relationship type (i.e., stranger, dating/friend, family) between the teen and the person in which they shared the sexual experience, 2) detected statistically significant differences in the proportions of posts based on these dimensions, and 3) further unpacked the nuance in how these online sexual risk experiences were typically characterized in the posts. Teens were significantly more likely to engage in consensual sexting with friends/dating partners; unwanted solicitations were more likely from strangers and sexual abuse was more likely when a family member was involved. We contribute to the HCI and CSCW literature around youth online sexual risk experiences by moving beyond the false dichotomy of "safe" versus "risky". Our work provides a deeper understanding of technology-mediated adolescent sexual behaviors from the perspectives of sexual well-being, risk detection, and the prevention of online sexual violence toward youth.
Alsoubai, Ashwaq; Razi, Afsaneh; Agha, Zainab; Ali, Shiza; Stringhini, Gianluca; De_Choudhury, Munmun; Wisniewski, Pamela J
(, Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction)
We conducted a study with 173 adolescents (ages 13-21), who self-reported their offline and online risk experiences and uploaded their Instagram data to our study website to flag private conversations as unsafe. Risk profiles were first created based on the survey data and then compared with the risk-flagged social media data. Five risk profiles emerged: Low Risks (51% of the participants), Medium Risks (29%), Increased Sexting (8%), Increased Self-Harm (8%), and High Risk Perpetration (4%). Overall, the profiles correlated well with the social media data with the highest level of risk occurring in the three smallest profiles. Youth who experienced increased sexting and self-harm frequently reported engaging in unsafe sexual conversations. Meanwhile, high risk perpetration was characterized by increased violence, threats, and sales/promotion of illegal activities. A key insight from our study was that offline risk behavior sometimes manifested differently in online contexts (i.e., offline self-harm as risky online sexual interactions). Our findings highlight the need for targeted risk prevention strategies for youth online safety.
Almansoori, Majed; Chatterjee, Rahul
(, Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies)
Social media applications have benefited users in several ways, including ease of communication and quick access to information. However, they have also introduced several privacy and safety risks. These risks are particularly concerning in the context of interpersonal attacks, which are carried out by abusive friends, family members, intimate partners, co-workers, or even strangers. Evidence shows interpersonal attackers regularly exploit social media platforms to harass and spy on their targets. To help protect targets from such attacks, social media platforms have introduced several privacy and safety features. However, it is unclear how effective they are against interpersonal threats. In this work, we analyzed ten popular social media applications, identifying 100 unique privacy and safety features that provide controls across eight categories: discoverability, visibility, saving and sharing, interaction, self-censorship, content moderation, transparency, and reporting. We simulated 59 different attack actions by a persistent attacker — aimed at account discovery, information gathering, non-consensual sharing, and harassment — and found many were successful. Based on our findings, we proposed improvements to mitigate these risks.
Dev, Prema, Medina, Jessica, Agha, Zainab, De Choudhury, Munmun, Razi, Afsaneh, and Wisniewski, Pamela. From Ignoring Strangers’ Solicitations to Mutual Sexting with Friends: Understanding Youth’s Online Sexual Risks in Instagram Private Conversations. Retrieved from https://par.nsf.gov/biblio/10353972. CSCW’22 Companion . Web. doi:10.1145/3500868.3559469.
Dev, Prema, Medina, Jessica, Agha, Zainab, De Choudhury, Munmun, Razi, Afsaneh, and Wisniewski, Pamela.
"From Ignoring Strangers’ Solicitations to Mutual Sexting with Friends: Understanding Youth’s Online Sexual Risks in Instagram Private Conversations". CSCW’22 Companion (). Country unknown/Code not available. https://doi.org/10.1145/3500868.3559469.https://par.nsf.gov/biblio/10353972.
@article{osti_10353972,
place = {Country unknown/Code not available},
title = {From Ignoring Strangers’ Solicitations to Mutual Sexting with Friends: Understanding Youth’s Online Sexual Risks in Instagram Private Conversations},
url = {https://par.nsf.gov/biblio/10353972},
DOI = {10.1145/3500868.3559469},
abstractNote = {Online sexual risks pose a serious and frequent threat to adolescents’ online safety. While significant work is done within the HCI community to understand teens’ sexual experiences through public posts, we extend their research by qualitatively analyzing 156 private Instagram conversations flagged by 58 adolescents to understand the characteristics of sexual risks faced with strangers, acquaintances, and friends. We found that youth are often victimized by strangers through sexual solicitation/harassment as well as sexual spamming via text and visual media, which is often ignored by them. In contrast, adolescents’ played mixed roles with acquaintances, as they were often victims of sexual harassment, but sometimes engaged in sexting, or interacted by rejecting sexual requests from acquaintances. Lastly, adolescents were never recipients of sexual risks with their friends, as they mostly mutually participated in sexting or sexual spamming. Based on these results, we provide our insights and recommendations for future researchers. Trigger Warning: This paper contains explicit language and anonymized private sexual messages. Reader discretion advised.},
journal = {CSCW’22 Companion},
author = {Dev, Prema and Medina, Jessica and Agha, Zainab and De Choudhury, Munmun and Razi, Afsaneh and Wisniewski, Pamela},
}
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