Teenagers’ lack of digital sophistication makes them vulnerable to social engineering attacks. Clickbait, one of such attacks, is primarily performed through social media to trick users into clicking on malicious links. With teenagers’ increasing use of social media, clickbait poses a substantial threat to their online safety. The existing online safety measures for teens mainly focus on parental mediation, which can be perceived as restrictive. Here, researchers recommended empowering teens to deal with online risks. To that end, we conducted co-design sessions with 27 teenagers aimed at understanding their perceptions and designing countermeasures against clickbait. Our findings suggest that teenagers are vulnerable to clickbait due to relevance and peer influence, where co-design revealed interventions with unique teen perspectives through storytelling. Overall, our study provides valuable insights into understanding teenagers’ needs around clickbait and interventions against it. We offer guidelines for future research in these directions based on our findings.

Children from divorced households are granted access to devices (e.g., smartphones, tablets), helping them to maintain meaningful contact with both parents. However, regulating their device usage across two households presents unique co-parenting challenges, which are little studied in the existing literature on parental mediation. As we begin to address this gap, we used low-fidelity prototype designs, guided by the principles of fostering open communication and instilling self-regulation. We evaluated those designs (presented in the form of storyboards) through semi-structured interviews with 23 divorced parents, whose children are active Internet users and aged 13 years or below. Based on our analysis, we identified six distinct personas under four co-parenting types: conflicted, cooperative, parallel, and uninvolved. We then validated these personas through three focus group sessions with seven divorced parents. Within the context of these personas, we delve into diverse co-parenting challenges, shed light on the perceived benefits of the design in addressing those challenges, and outline design modifications suggested by parents to suit various co-parenting situations. The insights from our studies offer recommendations and guidelines for future research in the sphere of dynamic co-parenting.

Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) often seek comfort from devices (e.g., smartphones) to deal with social overstimulation. However, such reliance exposes them to inappropriate digital content and increases susceptibility to mimicry and social vulnerability. Thus, parents having children with ASD encounter unique challenges in regulating their device usage, which are little addressed in the existing literature on parental mediation. As we begin to address this gap, we designed low-fidelity prototypes centered around open communication and self-regulation, which we refined based on the feedback from six ASD experts in two focus groups. We evaluated updated designs (presented in form of storyboards) through semi-structured interviews with 25 parents whose children with ASD (aged below 14) are active Internet users. Our study joins the body of work on parental mediation; our findings provide insights into inclusive parental control tools for children with ASD, and offer guidelines for future research in these directions.

Clickbait headlines work through superlatives and intensifiers, creating information gaps to increase the relevance of their associated links that direct users to time-wasting and sometimes even malicious websites. This approach can be amplified using targeted clickbait that takes publicly available information from social media to align clickbait to users’ preferences and beliefs. In this work, we first conducted preliminary studies to understand the influence of targeted clickbait on users’ clicking behavior. Based on our findings, we involved 24 users in the participatory design of story-based warnings against targeted clickbait. Our analysis of user-created warnings led to four design variations, which we evaluated through an online survey over Amazon Mechanical Turk. Our findings show the significance of integrating information with persuasive narratives to create effective warnings against targeted clickbait. Overall, our studies provide valuable insights into understanding users’ perceptions and behaviors towards targeted clickbait, and the efficacy of story-based interventions.