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Academic research is largely an adult endeavor that creates systemic power imbalances when studying teen-centered topics, such as adolescent online safety. To rectify this problem, we engaged seven teens as co-researchers through a year-and-a-half-long Youth Advisory Board (YAB) program to critically assess our research processes, lead online safety solutions, and to reflect on their experiences participating in a YAB. Teens pushed back on standard research practices such as parental consent, sought decision-making power in study documentation, design, and execution, and gave more meaningful feedback on research protocols when more deeply involved in the research. For safety interventions, teens proposed both incremental changes for social media platforms (e.g., advanced privacy settings) and more disruptive changes (e.g., decentralized social media platforms) that enhance individual control, digital resilience, and equity. For the YAB, teens highlighted challenges, such as losing momentum over time, lack of collaborative opportunities, and competing interests, fueling frustrations and rifts in engagement. Our research underscores the value of involving teens as co-partners in shaping online safety research. Finally, we provide design implications for social media safety interventions that strengthen teens' agency and actionable guidelines for developing future long-term programs to ensure meaningful contributions to online safety research. 

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. 

With the prevalence of risks encountered by youth online, strength-based approaches such as nudges have been recommended as potential solutions to guide teens toward safer decisions. However, most nudging interventions to date have not been designed to cater to teens' unique needs and online safety concerns. To address this gap, this study provided a comprehensive view of adolescents' feedback on online safety nudges to inform the design of more effective online safety interventions. We conducted 12 semi-structured interviews and 3 focus group sessions with 21 teens (13 - 17 years old) via Zoom to get their feedback on three types of nudge designs from two opposing perspectives (i.e., risk victim and perpetrator) and for two different online risks (i.e., Information Breaches and Cyberbullying). Based on the teens' responses, they expressed a desire that nudges need to move beyond solely warning the user to providing a clear and effective action to take in response to the risk. They also identified key differences that affect the perception of nudges in effectively addressing an online risk, they include age, risk medium, risk awareness, and perceived risk severity. Finally, the teens identified several challenges with nudges such as them being easy to ignore, disruptive, untimely, and possibly escalating the risk. To address these, teens recommended clearer and contextualized warnings, risk prevention, and nudge personalization as solutions to ensure effective nudging. Overall, we recommend online safety nudges be designed for victim guidance while providing autonomy to control their experiences, and to ensure accountability and prevention of risk perpetrators to restrict them from causing harm. 

Traditional online safety technologies often overly restrict teens and invade their privacy, while parents often lack knowledge regarding their digital privacy. As such, prior researchers have called for more collaborative approaches on adolescent online safety and networked privacy. In this paper, we propose family-centered approaches to foster parent-teen collaboration in ensuring their mobile privacy and online safety while respecting individual privacy, to enhance open discussion and teens' self-regulation. However, challenges such as power imbalances and conflicts with family values arise when implementing such approaches, making parent-teen collaboration difficult. Therefore, attending the family-centered design workshop provided an invaluable opportunity for us to discuss these challenges and identify best research practices for the future of collaborative online safety and privacy within families. 

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. 

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.