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We investigate whether nudges can serve as in-the-moment support for youth online safety through a qualitative Wizard-of-Oz study with 19 adolescents (ages 13–19) using a realistic social media simulation (“SocialSim”). Even before nudges were introduced, participants demonstrated safety competence by interpreting social cues and using protective strategies. When nudges appeared, teens responded differently depending on risk severity and context; they relied on nudge guidance in high-risk, ambiguous situations (e.g., exposure to explicit content), while preferring to exercise their own judgement in lower-risk scenarios (e.g., information requests). We found that nudges were most effective when framed as developmental teaching moments that increased risk awareness and offered actionable advice while preserving autonomy. Participants emphasized proportionality, personalization, and trustworthy risk detection, and cautioned against overly restrictive interventions. Using a Social Information Processing (SIP) framework, this work informs the design of in-the-moment supports that foster adolescents’ decision-making, resilience, and self-regulation online. 

Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) is widely used to study adolescents’ experiences; yet, how the design of EMA platforms shapes engagement, research practices, and power dynamics in youth studies remains under-examined. We developed a youthcentered EMA platform prioritizing youth engagement and researcher support, and evaluated it through a case study on a longitudinal investigation with adolescent twins focused on mental health and sleep behavior. Interviews with the research team examined how the platform design choices shaped participant onboarding, sustained engagement, risk monitoring, and data interpretation. The app’s teen-centered design and gamified features sustained teen engagement, while the web portal streamlined administrative oversight through a centralized dashboard. However, technical instability and rigid data structures created significant hurdles, leading to privacy concerns among parents and complicating the researchers’ ability to analyze raw usage metadata. We provide actionable interaction design guidelines for developing EMA platforms that prioritize youth agency, ethical practice, and research goals. 

In addressing various risks on social media, the HCI community has advocated for teen-centered risk detection technologies over platform-based, parent-centered features. However, their real-world viability remains underexplored by secondary stakeholders beyond the family unit. Therefore, we present an evaluation of a teencentered social media risk detection dashboard through online interviews with 33 online safety experts. While experts praised our dashboard’s clear design for teen agency, their feedback revealed five primary tensions in implementing and sustaining such technology: objective vs. context-dependent risk definition, informing risks vs. meaningful intervention, teen empowerment vs. motivation, need for data vs. data privacy, and independence vs. sustainability. These findings motivate us to rethink “teen-centered” and a shift from a “fail fast” to a “mature safely” paradigm for youth safety technology innovation.We offer design implications for addressing these tensions before system deployment with teens and strategies for aligning secondary stakeholders’ interests to deploy and sustain such technologies in the broader ecosystem of youth online safety. 

Cybergrooming is a form of online abuse that threatens teens’ mental health and physical safety. Yet, most prior work has focused on detecting perpetrators’ behaviors, leaving a limited understanding of how teens might respond to such unwanted advances. To address this gap, we conducted an online survey with 74 participants—51 parents and 23 teens—who responded to simulated cybergrooming scenarios in two ways: responses that they think would make teens more vulnerable or resilient to unwanted sexual advances. Through a mixed-methods analysis, we identified four types of vulnerable responses (encouraging escalation, accepting an advance, displaying vulnerability, and negating risk concern) and four types of protective strategies (setting boundaries, directly declining, signaling risk awareness, and leveraging avoidance techniques). As the cybergrooming risk escalated, both vulnerable responses and protective strategies showed a corresponding progression. This study contributes a teen-centered understanding of cybergrooming, a labeled dataset, and a stage-based taxonomy of perceived protective strategies, while offering implications for educational programs and sociotechnical interventions. 

Social media platforms have faced increasing scrutiny over whether and how they protect youth online. While online risks to children have been well-documented by prior research, how social media platforms communicate about these risks and their efforts to improve youth safety have not been holistically examined. To fill this gap, we analyzedN= 352 press releases and safety-related blogs published between 2019 and 2024 by four platforms popular among youth: YouTube, TikTok, Meta (Facebook and Instagram), and Snapchat. Leveraging both inductive and deductive qualitative approaches, we developed a comprehensive framework of sevenproblem areaswhere risks arise, and social media platforms claim to address these risks through various online safety features. Our analysis revealed uneven emphasis across problem areas, with most communications focused on Content Exposure and Interpersonal Communication, whereas less emphasis was placed on Content Creation, Data Access, and Platform Access. Additionally, we identified three problematic communication practices related to their described safety features, including discrepancies between feature implementation and availability, unclear or inconsistent explanations of safety feature operation, and a lack of evidence regarding the effectiveness of safety features in mitigating risks once implemented. Based on these findings, we discuss the communication gaps between risks and the described safety features, as well as the tensions in achieving transparency in platform communication. Our analysis of platform communication informs guidelines for responsibly communicating about youth safety features. 

We argue that the appropriate response to the risks of generative AI is not restriction or bans, but responsible harnessing. We investigate the dual-use nature of LLMs in the context of youth and cybergrooming: first, by demonstrating how LLMs can function as dangerous persuaders capable of adaptive unethical influence; and second, by constraining and restructuring these capabilities into stage-based, developmentally appropriate simulations designed to build teen resilience. Grounded in our empirical research with teens and parents, we aim to move beyond reactive detection toward proactive, experiential learning tools teach teens how to identify and combat unwanted cybergrooming advances. Teens are already engaging with AI systems, and attempting to limit or prevent benefit use is neither realistic nor developmentally appropriate. Therefore, we advocate for a “learning-by-doing” educational model that designs structured, well-guarded GenAI experiences to educate teens through direct interaction. By engaging with realistic but developmentally appropriate AI simulations, teens can learn to identify cybergrooming tactics, recognize escalation patterns, and practice strategies to mitigate risks, so that they can navigate both real-world cybergrooming and AI companion-based cybergrooming attempts responsibly. 

Although social media use is ubiquitous among adolescents, research often emphasizes benefits and risks without considering the design-based affordances that may influence these experiences. Affordances enable or constrain user behavior and thus provide a valuable lens for promoting positive online engagement. To this end, we developed an affordance-centered framework and systematically coded 66 empirical studies on U.S. adolescents published in the past decade to map how platform features relate to specific user activities, the affordances they instantiate, and associated benefits and risks. For instance, Discoverability affordance, driven by algorithmic recommendations, supported Cognitive engagement by facilitating learning while heightening exposure to misinformation. Visibility affordance enabled Identity exploration through ephemeral sharing, lowering performance anxiety but raising post-disclosure regret when content reached hostile viewers. By clarifying how specific affordances facilitate adolescent experiences, our work contributes a design-grounded framework for future research that advances both theoretical understanding and the development of youth-centered interventions. 

Youth, while tech-savvy and highly active on social media, are still vulnerable to online privacy and security risks. Therefore, it is critical to understand how they negotiate and manage social connections versus protecting themselves in online contexts. In this work, we conducted a thematic analysis of 1,318 private conversations on Instagram from 149 youth aged 13-21 to understand the digital privacy and security topics they discussed, if and how they engaged in risky privacy behaviors, and how they balanced the benefits and risks (i.e., privacy calculus) of making these decisions. Overall, youth were forthcoming when broaching a wide range of topics on digital privacy and security, ranging from password management and account access challenges to shared experiences of being victims of privacy risks. However, they also openly engaged in risky behaviors, such as sharing personal account information with peers and even perpetrating privacy and security risks against others. Nonetheless, we found many of these behaviors could be explained by the unique ''privacy calculus'' of youth, where they often prioritized social benefits over potential risks; for instance, youth often shared account credentials with peers to foster social connection and affirmation. As such, we provide a nuanced understanding of youth decision-making regarding digital security and privacy, highlighting both positive behaviors, tensions, and points of concern. We encourage future research to continue to challenge the potentially untrue narratives regarding youth and their digital privacy and security to unpack the nuance of their privacy calculus that may differ from that of adults. 

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.