Bystander intervention, or upstanding, is an effective antidote to cyberbullying, but entails many challenges (e.g. self-efficacy, not knowing what to do or how to upstand). Through two studies, this paper investigates collaborative upstanding, examining how a conversational partner (human or AI) can guide bystanders through these challenges in-situ. In a paired role-play study (n=24), we found that bystanders faced significant challenges in how to intervene. Even after deciding to act, how-to challenges often reignited doubts about their self-efficacy and responsibility. Using these insights, we designed ConCUR, a chatbot that (1) encourages bystanders to co-author an upstanding message, leading them to confront how-to challenges sooner, and (2) addresses how-to challenges simultaneously with other challenges that are introduced through a flexible process. Our second study (n=20) suggests such a chatbot is effective in promoting upstanding behavior in the lab setting. We discuss the implications of in-situ collaborative upstanding to upstanding education research, framing upstanding as an iterative and flexible process rather than sequential.

Technology provides youth (ages 10--17) with near-constant opportunities for learning, communication, and self-expression. It can also expose them to technology-facilitated abuse: harassment, coercion, fraud, and more. The ability of youth to navigate such abuse is crucial for their well-being and development. A recent advisory by the U.S. Surgeon General called for better support of youth, including that youth should ''reach out for help.'' However, little is known about how youth seek help or otherwise cope with technology-facilitated abuse. Through a qualitative study in the U.S., we examine how youth engage in self-reliance, seek help from others, and how others seek help on a youth's behalf. We discuss these strategies and outline opportunities for how the HCI community can better support youth who experience technology-facilitated abuse.

Cyberbullying harms teenagers’ mental health, and teaching them upstanding intervention is crucial. Wizard-of-Oz studies show chatbots can scale up personalized and interactive cyberbullying education, but implementing such chatbots is a challenging and delicate task. We created a no-code chatbot design tool for K-12 teachers. Using large language models and prompt chaining, our tool allows teachers to prototype bespoke dialogue flows and chatbot utterances. In offering this tool, we explore teachers’ distinctive needs when designing chatbots to assist their teaching, and how chatbot design tools might better support them. Our findings reveal that teachers welcome the tool enthusiastically. Moreover, they see themselves as playwrights guiding both the students’ and the chatbot’s behaviors, while allowing for some improvisation. Their goal is to enable students to rehearse both desirable and undesirable reactions to cyberbullying in a safe environment. We discuss the design opportunities LLM-Chains offer for empowering teachers and the research opportunities this work opens up.

The seamless integration of technology into the lives of youth has raised concerns about their digital safety. While prior work has explored youth experiences with physical, sexual, and emotional threats—such as bullying and trafficking—a comprehensive and in-depth understanding of the myriad threats that youth experience is needed. By synthesizing the perspectives of 36 youth and 65 adult participants from the U.S., we provide an overview of today’s complex digital-safety landscape. We describe attacks youth experienced, how these moved across platforms and into the physical world, and the resulting harms. We also describe protective practices the youth and the adults who support them took to prevent, mitigate, and recover from attacks, and key barriers to doing this effectively. Our findings provide a broad perspective to help improve digital safety for youth and set directions for future work.

There is a concerning lack of clear and accurate information around accessing public benefits for asylum applicants in the United States (U.S.), which has been shown to negatively affect their healthcare engagement. Digital tools such as websites and mobile applications can be a potentially promising way to disseminate public benefits information to asylum applicants. The goal of this study is to understand the current informational needs of asylum applicants in the U.S. seeking legal information and resources regarding their individual rights to public health benefits and services. Through semi-structured interviews with 24 asylum applicants currently in the U.S. and 13 healthcare and legal professionals working with asylum applicants and other immigrants, we identify four key challenges and barriers to using currently available digital tools: information uncertainty, accessibility, emotional barriers, and contextual sensitivity. Our findings highlight the importance of considering multiple stakeholders' perspectives when designing tools within the immigration informational space. We provide targeted design recommendations to create digital tools for asylum seekers and the stakeholders who support them.

Understanding how and why people share negative emotions and thoughts on social media has received much scholarly attention. Scholars have identified a variety of factors that affect disclosure behavior, but as platforms offer a wider range of affordances that enable more diverse user behaviors and nuanced audience segmentation, these influencing factors are increasingly intertwined. However, little is known about the interrelatedness of platform, affordance, and audience. Drawing on survey data of 470 American adults during the COVID-19 pandemic, this study examines the interplay and relative strength of the factors influencing distress disclosure on social media. We introduce the concept of social media disclosure ecology as an analytical lens to understand online disclosure. The results suggest that perceived affordances (i.e., anonymity, persistence, visibility control) and relational closeness to audience separately and interactively predict the depth of distress disclosure, which in turn affects satisfaction with disclosure. This study contributes to the literature on online-disclosure and privacy, while providing implications for the design of social media to better support people in distress.

Online informal support networks may provide a critical source of support for young people who self-injure. While these platforms are often intended to mitigate digital harm, there is limited understanding of how individuals use peer support venues to seek self-injury related support and the specific contingencies of supportive exchanges. The present mixed-methods study was designed to explore the types of concerns members express on a mobile peer support application and the types of responses that they receive. Specifically, our aims were to (1) understand the prevalence of peer support types exchanged and (2) surface more nuanced themes within these categories of support. We also explore the relationship between support sought through posts and received through comments. Findings have important theoretical implications for understanding support seeking and provision through a mobile peer support app, which can help guide the design and optimization of peer-driven platforms for individuals who self-injure.

In this paper, we explore the use of virtual reality (VR) in assisting individuals who self-injure. Past work on self-injury in HCI has focused almost exclusively on mobile applications and message boards. As VR systems become more common, it is worth exploring what unique affordances of the technology can be leveraged to support self-injury reduction and cessation. Research on VR intervention and self-injury treatment informed the design of three novel virtual reality experiences. Nineteen interviews were conducted with individuals with current, or a past history of, self-injury with the goals of uncovering overall impressions of the perceived efficacy of VR with this population, as well as better understanding key mechanisms which impact their experience. Our analysis reveals four key elements common across all experiences: transportation, embodiment, immersion/distraction, and sense of control, and additional themes within each unique experience. We discuss the implications of these findings for future intervention design.

Conversational agents are increasingly becoming integrated into everyday technologies and can collect large amounts of data about users. As these agents mimic interpersonal interactions, we draw on communication privacy management theory to explore people's privacy expectations with conversational agents. We conducted a 3x3 factorial experiment in which we manipulated agents' social interactivity and data sharing practices to understand how these factors influence people's judgments about potential privacy violations and their evaluations of agents. Participants perceived agents that shared response data with advertisers more negatively compared to agents that shared such data with only their companies; perceptions of privacy violations did not differ between agents that shared data with their companies and agents that did not share information at all. Participants also perceived the socially interactive agent's sharing practices less negatively than those of the other agents, highlighting a potential privacy vulnerability that users are exposed to in interactions with socially interactive conversational agents.

Social media sites are where life happens for many of today's young people, so it is important to teach them to use these sites safely and effectively. Many youth receive classroom education on digital literacy topics, but have few chances to build actual skills. Social Media TestDrive, an interactive social media simulation, fills a gap in digital literacy education by combining experiential learning in a realistic and safe social media environment with educator-facilitated classroom lessons. The tool was piloted with 12 educators and over 200 students, and formative evaluation data suggest that TestDrive achieved high levels of engagement with both groups. Students reported the modules enhanced their understanding of digital citizenship issues, and educators noted that students were engaging in meaningful classroom conversations. Finally, we discuss the importance of involving multiple stakeholder groups (e.g., researchers, youth, educators, curriculum developers) in designing educational technology.

People with invisible chronic illnesses (ICIs) can use social media to seek both informational and emotional support, but these individuals also face social and health-related challenges in posting about their often-stigmatized conditions online. To understand how they evaluate different platforms for disclosure, we interviewed 19 people with ICIs who post on general social media about their illnesses, such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. We present a cross-platform analysis of how platforms varied in their suitability to achieve participants' goals, as well as the challenges posed by each platform. We also found that as participants' ICIs progressed, their goals, challenges, and social media use similarly evolved over time. Our findings highlight how people with ICIs select platforms from a broader ecology of social media and suggest a general need to understand shifts in social media use for populations with chronic but changing health concerns.

Bystander intervention can reduce the amount of cyberbullying victimization on social media, but bystanders often fail to act. Limited accountability for their behavior and a lack of empathy for the victim are frequently cited as reasons for why bystanders do not act against cyberbullying. We developed design interventions that aimed to increase accountability and empathy among bystanders. In Study 1, participants were experimentally exposed to three social media posts with different types of empathy nudges. Empathy nudges embedded into social media posts displayed the potential to motivate empathy. In Study 2, participants took part in a 3-day experiment that simulated a social media experience. Results suggested that increased social transparency on social media promoted accountability through heightened self-presentation concerns, but empathy nudges did not encourage greater bystander empathy. Both accountability and empathy predicted bystander intervention, but the types of bystander actions promoted by each mechanism differed. We consider how these results contribute to theories of bystander behavior and designing social media to promote prosocial behaviors.

Although bystander intervention can mitigate the negative effects of cyberbullying, few bystanders ever attempt to intervene. In this study, we explored the effects of interface design on bystander intervention using a simulated custom-made social media platform. Participants took part in a three-day, in-situ experiment, in which they were exposed to several cyberbullying incidents. Depending on the experimental condition, they received different information about the audience size and viewing notifications intended to increase a sense of personal responsibility in bystanders. Results indicated that bystanders were more likely to intervene indirectly than directly, and information about the audience size and viewership increased the likelihood of flagging cyberbullying posts through serial mediation of public surveillance, accountability, and personal responsibility. The study has implications for understanding bystander effect in cyberbullying, and how to develop design solutions to encourage bystander intervention in social media.

In this paper, we study online privacy lies: lies primarily aimed at protecting privacy. Going beyond privacy lenses that focus on privacy concerns or cost/benefit analyses, we explore how contextual factors, motivations, and individual-level characteristics affect lying behavior through a 356-person survey. We find that statistical models to predict privacy lies that include attitudes about lying, use of other privacy-protective behaviors (PPBs), and perceived control over information improve on models based solely on self-expressed privacy concerns. Based on a thematic analysis of open-ended responses, we find that the decision to tell privacy lies stems from a range of concerns, serves multiple privacy goals, and is influenced by the context of the interaction and attitudes about the morality and necessity of lying. Together, our results point to the need for conceptualizations of privacy lies-and PPBs more broadly-that account for multiple goals, perceived control over data, contextual factors, and attitudes about PPBs.

Unlike most social media, where automatic archiving of data is the default, Snapchat defaults to ephemerality: deleting content shortly after it is viewed by a receiver. Interviews with 25 Snapchat users show that ephemerality plays a key role in shaping their practices. Along with friend-adding features that facilitate a network of mostly close relations, default deletion affords everyday, mundane talk and reduces self-consciousness while encouraging playful interaction. Further, although receivers can save content through screenshots, senders are notified; this selective saving with notification supports complex information norms that preserve the feel of ephemeral communication while supporting the capture of meaningful content. This dance of giving and taking, sharing and showing, and agency for both senders and receivers provides the basis for a rich design space of mechanisms, levels, and domains for ephemerality.

People often share emotions with others in order to manage their emotional experiences. We investigate how social media properties such as visibility and directedness affect how people share emotions in Facebook, and their satisfaction after doing so. 141 participants rated 1,628 of their own recent status updates, posts they made on others' timelines, and private messages they sent for intensity, valence, personal relevance, and overall satisfaction felt after sharing each message. For network-visible channels-status updates and posts on others' timelines-they also rated their satisfaction with replies they received. People shared differently between channels, with more intense and negative emotions in private messages. People felt more satisfied after sharing more positive emotions in all channels and after sharing more personally relevant emotions in network-visible channels. Finally, people's overall satisfaction after sharing emotions in network-visible channels is strongly tied to their reply satisfaction. Quality of replies, not just quantity, matters, suggesting the need for designs that help people receive valuable responses to their shared emotions.

Social network sites (SNSs) provide new forms of communication, in which people routinely share personal information with a large audience. The goal of this research is to examine how a public context in which disclosures are revealed influences receivers' impressions of disclosure and a discloser on SNSs. The results of the original study reported in this paper indicate that publicly shared disclosures were perceived as less intimate and less appropriate than privately shared disclosures on Facebook, and perceptions of disclosure appropriateness mediated the effects of public/private contexts on social attraction for a discloser. The results inform research on social outcomes associated with SNS's use, as well as design considerations for privacy- and disclosure-related behaviors in social media.

Managing one's availability for interaction with others is an increasingly complex act, involving multiple media and the sharing of many types of information. In this paper we draw on a field study of 183 SMS users to introduce the idea of the "interpersonal awareness narrative" -- the coherent, plausible and sometimes deceptive stories that people tell each other about their availability and activities. We examine participants' use of deception in these accounts, and focus in particular on "butler lies," those lies told to enter or exit conversations or to arrange other interactions. We argue that participants use this type of deception in SMS strategically, drawing on the inherent ambiguities of SMS while maintaining plausible narratives.

Instant messaging (IM) is a common and popular way for co-workers, friends, and family to stay in touch, but its"always-on properties can sometimes lead people to feel overexposed or too readily available to others for conversation. This, in turn, may lead people to deceive others about their actual status or availability. In this paper, we introduce the notion of the "butler lie to describe lies that allow for polite initiation and termination of conversations. We present results from a field study of 50 IM users, in which participants rated each of their messages at the time of sending to indicate whether or not it was deceptive. About one tenth of all IM messages were rated as lies and, of these, about one fifth were butler lies. These results suggest that butler lies are an important social practice in IM, and that existing approaches to interpersonal awareness, which focus on accurate assessment of availability, may need to take deception and other social practices into account.