An official website of the United States government
As part of a Youth Advisory Board of teens (YAB), a longitudinal and interactive program to engage with teens for adolescent online safety research, we used an Asynchronous Remote Community (ARC) method with seven teens to explore their social media usage and perspectives on privacy on social media. There was a spectrum of privacy levels in our teen participants’ preferred social media platforms and preferences varied depending on their user goals such as content viewing and socializing. They recognized privacy risks they could encounter on social media, hence, actively used privacy features afforded by platforms to stay safe while meeting their goals. In addition, our teen participants designed solutions that can aid users to exercise more granular control over determining what information on their accounts is to be shared with which groups of users. Our findings highlight the need to ensure researchers and social media developers work with teens to provide teen-centric solutions for safer experiences on social media.
more »
« less
This content will become publicly available on June 23, 2026
Teens, Privacy, and Algorithms: Navigating and Co-Designing Solutions for Interpersonal Boundary Management on Social Media
On social media, teens must manage their interpersonal boundaries not only with other people, but also with the algorithms embedded in these platforms. In this context, we engaged seven teens in an Asynchronous Remote Community (ARC) as part of a multi-year Youth Advisory Board (YAB) to discuss how they navigate, cope, and co-design for improved boundary management. Teens had preconceived notions of different platforms and navigated boundaries based on specific goals; yet, they struggled when platforms lacked the granular controls needed to meet their needs. Teens enjoyed the personalization afforded by algorithms, but they felt violated when algorithms pushed unwanted content. Teens designed features for enhanced control over their discoverability and for real-time risk detection to avoid boundary turbulence. We provide design guidelines for improved social media boundary management for youth and pinpoint educational opportunities to enhance teens’ understanding and use of social media privacy settings and algorithms.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 2329976
- PAR ID:
- 10634957
- Publisher / Repository:
- ACM
- Date Published:
- ISBN:
- 9798400714733
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 589 to 607
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- Reykjavik Iceland
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
The debate on whether social media has a net positive or negative effect on youth is ongoing. Therefore, we conducted a thematic analysis on 2,061 posts made by 1,038 adolescents aged 15-17 on an online peer-support platform to investigate the ways in which these teens discussed popular social media platforms in their posts and to identify differences in their experiences across platforms. Our findings revealed four main emergent themes for the ways in which social media was discussed: 1) Sharing negative experiences or outcomes of social media use (58%, n = 1,095), 2) Attempts to connect with others (45%, n = 922), 3) Highlighting the positive side of social media use (20%, n = 409), and 4) Seeking information (20%, n = 491). Overall, while sharing about negative experiences was more prominent, teens also discussed balanced perspectives of connection-seeking, positive experiences, and information support on social media that should not be discounted. Moreover, we found statistical significance for how these experiences differed across social media platforms. For instance, teens were most likely to seek romantic relationships on Snapchat and self-promote on YouTube. Meanwhile, Instagram was mentioned most frequently for body shaming, and Facebook was the most commonly discussed platform for privacy violations (mostly from parents). The key takeaway from our study is that the benefits and drawbacks of teens' social media usage can co-exist and net effects (positive or negative) can vary across different teens across various contexts. As such, we advocate for mitigating the negative experiences and outcomes of social media use as voiced by teens, to improve, rather than limit or restrict, their overall social media experience. We do this by taking an affordance perspective that aims to promote the digital well-being and online safety of youth by design.more » « less
-
null (Ed.)The methods in which we study the online experiences of adolescents should be evidence-based and informed by youth. This is especially true when studying sensitive topics, such as the online risk behaviors of minors. We directly engaged 20 adolescents (ages 12-18) in the co-design of two different research methodologies (i.e., diary studies and analyzing social media trace data) for conducting adolescent online safety research. We also interviewed 13 of their parents to understand their perspectives. Overall, teens wanted to share their personal experiences and benefit society, while parents wanted researchers to tackle a topic that they felt was a prevalent problem for teens. Yet, they both had significant concerns regarding data privacy of the sensitive disclosures made by teens during such studies. Teens' feared getting in trouble. Participants emphasized the importance of developing a trusting relationship with the researcher to overcome these concerns. Participants also saw the potential for using the research study as a tool for risk-reporting and mitigation, where researchers could act as liaisons between the teens and other parties (e.g., counselors, law enforcement, parents) to share pertinent risk details and facilitate resources or even help teens directly by giving them strategies for mitigating online risks they encountered during the study. Our research delves into important ethical considerations for conducting risk-focused research with adolescents and uncovers the critical need for designing risk-based research for youth protection. We provide researchers with heuristic guidelines for conducting ethical research with vulnerable populations (i.e., adolescents) and keeping participants safe while doing so.more » « less
-
There is growing concern regarding adolescent online risks posed by social media. Prior work calls for a paradigm shift from restrictive approaches towards strength-based solutions to online safety, that provide autonomy and control to teens. To better understand how we might design online safety interventions that help teens deal with online risks, we must include teens as partners in the design and evaluation of online safety solutions. To address this gap, my first dissertation study focused on co-designing online safety features with teens, which showed that teens often design real-time interventions that resemble "nudges". Therefore, my dissertation focuses on evaluating the effectiveness of these nudge designs in an ecologically valid social media simulation. To do this, I will conduct three studies: 1) a User Experience Bootcamp with teens to teach them design skills for co-designing online safety features, 2) a focus group study to design an ecologically valid social media simulation, 3) a between-subjects experiment within a social media simulation for evaluating the effect of nudges in educating teens and helping them make safer choices when exposed to risk. My goal for this research is to understand, design, develop, and evaluate online safety nudges that can help promote self-regulated, autonomous, and safer interactions for teens online.more » « less
-
In this work, we present a case study on an Instagram Data Donation (IGDD) project, which is a user study and web-based platform for youth (ages 13-21) to donate and annotate their Instagram data with the goal of improving adolescent online safety. We employed human-centered design principles to create an ecologically valid dataset that will be utilized to provide insights from teens’ private social media interactions and train machine learning models to detect online risks. Our work provides practical insights and implications for Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) researchers that collect and study social media data to address sensitive problems relating to societal good.more » « less
