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.

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 teen-centered 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.

Understanding how social interactions affect privacy management is important in today’s digital landscape. We are investigating collective management of privacy and security through a mobile application, CO-oPS, that allows people to view and discuss each other’s app privacy settings within a community of users. Sixteen small, self-organized groups, totaling 81 participants, used the app over a four-week period. Data collection included pre- and post-study surveys measuring privacy perceptions (Community Belonging, Self-Efficacy, Community Collective Efficacy) along with in-app behavioral logs (messaging and viewing activity). In this paper, we present a social network analysis of our field study data, exploring the effects of group formation and engagement on building privacy and security efficacy through CO-oPS interactions. Our analysis reveals that while privacy perceptions were not initially homophilous, they grew more similar over time. Notably, proactively messaging others in the app enhanced personal privacy management confidence. Our results demonstrate the nuanced ways that groups can influence each other in addressing security and privacy needs.

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.

Ensuring the online safety of youth has motivated research towards the development of machine learning (ML) methods capable of accurately detecting social media risks after-the-fact. However, for these detection models to be effective, they must proactively identify high-risk scenarios (e.g., sexual solicitations, cyberbullying) to mitigate harm. This `real-time' responsiveness is a recognized challenge within the risk detection literature. Therefore, this paper presents a novel two-level framework that first uses reinforcement learning to identify conversation stop points to prioritize messages for evaluation. Then, we optimize state-of-the-art deep learning models to accurately categorize risk priority (low, high). We apply this framework to a time-based simulation using a rich dataset of 23K private conversations with over 7 million messages donated by 194 youth (ages 13-21). We conducted an experiment comparing our new approach to a traditional conversation-level baseline. We found that the timeliness of conversations significantly improved from over 2 hours to approximately 16 minutes with only a slight reduction in accuracy (0.88 to 0.84). This study advances real-time detection approaches for social media data and provides a benchmark for future training reinforcement learning that prioritizes the timeliness of classifying high-risk conversations.

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.

We analyzed 1,596 sub-conversations within 451 direct message (DM) conversations from 67 teens (ages 13-17) who engaged in private discussions about body image on Instagram. Our findings show that teens often receive support when sharing struggles with negative body image, participate in criticism when engaging in body-shaming, and are met with appreciation when promoting positive body image. Additionally, these types of disclosures and responses varied based on whether the conversations were one-on-one or group-based. We found that sharing struggles and receiving support most often occurred in one-on-one conversations, while body shaming and negative interactions often occurred in group settings. A key insight of the study is that private social media settings can significantly influence how teens discuss and respond to body image issues. Based on these findings, we propose design guidelines for social media platforms that can foster positive interactions around body image, ultimately creating a healthier and more supportive online environment for teens struggling with body image concerns.

The SIGCHI and Social Computing research communities have been at the forefront of online safety efforts for youth, ranging from understanding the serious risks youth face online to developing evidence-based interventions for risk protection. Yet, to bring these efforts to bear, we must partner with practitioners, such as industry stakeholders who know how to bring such technologies to market, and youth service providers who work directly with youth. Therefore, we interviewed 33 stakeholders in the space of youth online safety, including industry professionals (n=12), youth service providers (n=11), and researchers (n=10) to understand where their visions toward working together to protect youth online converged and surfaced tensions, as well as how we might reconcile conflicting viewpoints to move forward as one community with synergistic expertise on how to change the current sociotechnical landscape for youth online safety. Overall, we found that non-partisan leadership is necessary to chart actionable, equitable goals to facilitate collaboration between stakeholders, combat feelings of isolation, and foster trust between the stakeholder groups. Based on these findings, we recommend the use of open-innovation methods with their inherent transparency, federated governance models, and clear but inclusive leadership structures to promote collaboration between youth online safety stakeholders. We propose the creation of an open-innovation organization that unifies the diverse voices in youth online safety to develop open-standards and evidence-based design patterns that centralize otherwise fragmented efforts that have fallen short of the goal of effective technological solutions that keep youth safe online.

Youth implicated in the child welfare and juvenile justice systems, as well as those with an incarcerated parent, are considered the most vulnerable Children in Need of Services (CHINS). We identified 1,160 of these at-risk youth (ages 13-17) who sought support via an online peer support platform to understand their adverse childhood experiences and explore how the internet played a role in providing an outlet for support, as well as potentially facilitating risks. We first analyzed posts from 1,160 youth who self-identified as CHINS while sharing about their adverse experiences. Then, we retrieved all 239,929 posts by these users to identify salient topics within their support-seeking posts: 1) Urges to self-harm due to social drama, 2) desire for social connection, 3) struggles with family, and 4) substance use and sexual risks. We found that the internet often helped facilitate these problems; for example, the desperation for social connection often led to meeting unsafe people online, causing additional trauma. Family members and other unsafe people used the internet to perpetrate cyberabuse, while CHINS themselves leveraged online channels to engage in illegal and risky behavior. Our study calls for tailored support systems that address the unique needs of CHINS to promote safe online spaces and foster resilience to break the cycle of adversity. Empowering CHINS requires amplifying their voices and acknowledging the challenges they face as a result of their adverse childhood experiences.

While risk is highly subjective, especially when it comes to the private online interactions of youth, third-party annotations are often performed to identify risky content. Therefore, we conducted a mixed-methods study to examine if, how, and why risk perceptions might differ between youth and third-party annotators who were research assistants (RAs). We first asked 100 youth to share their Instagram private messages and flag media that made them feel unsafe. Then, we had RAs annotate the same media to identify what they thought was unsafe or risky. Compared to RAs, youth tended to flag images as risky when they perceived targeted harassment towards them or unwanted solicitations from strangers. In contrast, RAs were more likely to risk-flag sexual images with a humorous undertone shared among friends. Our findings highlight the differences between how online risks are perceived by youth compared to RAs. We provide recommendations for assessing online risks based on multiple perspectives to inform future youth-centered risk mitigation approaches.

HCI research has been at the forefront of designing interventions for protecting teens online; yet, how can we test and evaluate these solutions without endangering the youth we aim to protect? Towards this goal, we conducted focus groups with 20 teens to inform the design of a social media simulation platform and study for evaluating online safety nudges co-designed with teens. Participants evaluated risk scenarios, personas, platform features, and our research design to provide insight regarding the ecological validity of these artifacts. Teens expected risk scenarios to be subtle and tricky, while also higher in risk to be believable. The teens iterated on the nudges to prioritize risk prevention without reducing autonomy, risk coping, and community accountability. For the simulation, teens recommended using transparency with some deceit to balance realism and respect for participants. Our meta-level research provides a teen-centered action plan to evaluate online safety interventions safely and effectively.

Accurate real-time risk identification is vital to protecting social media users from online harm, which has driven research towards advancements in machine learning (ML). While strides have been made regarding the computational facets of algorithms for “real-time” risk detection, such research has not yet evaluated these advancements through a human-centered lens. To this end, we conducted a systematic literature review of 53 peer-reviewed articles on real-time risk detection on social media. Real-time detection was mainly operationalized as “early” detection after-the-fact based on pre-defined chunks of data and evaluated based on standard performance metrics, such as timeliness. We identified several human-centered opportunities for advancing current algorithms, such as integrating human insight in feature selection, algorithms’ improvement considering human behavior, and utilizing human evaluations. This work serves as a critical call-to-action for the HCI and ML communities to work together to protect social media users before, during, and after exposure to risks.

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."

Despite the potential of online spaces for the democratic development of public discourse, concerns over aggressive and uncivil interactions in those spaces are rising. Online incivility is the term to define the features of a discussion that convey an unnecessarily disrespectful tone toward the participants or the topic. Concerning the adverse impact of online incivility on users, we sought to explore ways to reduce online incivility to promote secure and trustworthy online debate culture. Meanwhile, the web is becoming increasingly multimodal and images are known to be an effective way of improving emotions. The broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions suggests that positive emotions generated by positive images can impact incivility levels. Hence, with the goal to reduce online incivility, we conducted a one factorial between-subject online experiment with three conditions (N = 105). We compared the three conditions (with a positive background image in color, a positive background image in grayscale, and no background image) to identify an efficient way of reducing online incivility. The data gathered from surveys and participants' online comments were qualitatively and quantitatively analyzed to answer the research questions. The results showed that not only positive backgrounds in color but also positive backgrounds in grayscale may be effective in reducing online incivility. The results will pave way for designing more civil discussion platforms in online settings.