A Relentless Cycle of Online Risks: How Teens Co-Design for Online Risk Prevention & Collective Safety
With the constant online presence of teens in the digital era, their safety online has become a critical issue. Social media platforms are under additional scrutiny to address the risks that teens face online, and new laws have been enacted globally to safeguard teens on the web. Existing interventions have largely focused on parental controls, which is often considered privacy invasive by teens as they desire more autonomy online. Recently, there has been a shift towards more strength-based approaches that empower teens in resiliently managing their online safety. However, there is still a gap in how to design and implement such interventions that are relevant to teens’ experiences. In the process, how can we include the voice of teens as the primary stakeholders? Therefore, we designed solutions for teens with teens, by involving them as equal partners in the design process. To do this, we conducted bootcamps with 21 teens (ages 13–17) with the end goal of creating storyboards depicting online risks and developing high-fidelity prototypes for online safety interventions.
TL; DR;
- We worked with 21 teens in the US to teach them design tools (e.g., Figma) and design skills (e.g., high-fidelity prototyping) so that they could effectively design online safety solutions.
- Teens most often described risk scenarios that included information breaches or sexually inappropriate messages from strangers, and cyberbullying and harassment from people they knew.
- Teens used a combination of blocking, reporting, and deleting to cope with these risks but did not find their existing approaches to be effective as they often reported that risks repeated in an unrelenting cycle.
- To help deal with these online risks effectively, teens designed real-time online safety interventions which often resembled “nudges”.
- Interestingly, teens often designed for risk prevention (rather than risk coping) by focusing on the perpetrator by encouraging them to rethink their actions, by blocking harmful actions from occurring, or penalizing perpetrators for inappropriate behavior.
Existing safety features are often ineffective in helping teens feel safe
Instagram emerged to be one of the most popular social media platforms among teens in our study, but it was also one of the main sources of online risks. Many teens shared their stories of how they or someone they knew encountered strangers who tried to get their personal information through direct messages and post it online without their consent. This could be their name, age, phone number, or even where they live or go to school. Some of them used the term “doxing”, which is a common way for strangers to misuse information with a malicious intent. Sometimes, these strangers also sent them inappropriate messages, bullied them, or harassed them. While a majority of the sexual risk were perpetuated by strangers, teens faced more cyberbullying with friends or people they knew, which could impact their mental health. For instance, a 15-year-old Female shared how her friend was cyberbullied,
“They [classmates] were sending her these like very mean messages, criticizing her, like her looks her body and just saying she’s not good at this stuff… she was like falling into depression”
Others shared more targeted and severe threats faced during gaming environments. For example, a 13-year-old, Male shared how he faced serious threats from another player who attacked and threatened him while playing Fortnite. Despite frequently blocking or reporting these risks, teens were unsatisfied with the existing safety features. They reported that they were either ineffective in making them feel safe or worse, the risks often persisted through fake accounts or similar risks with other accounts, as summarized in the Sankey diagram below.
Teens wanted nudges for risk prevention, accountability, and collective safety
Teens co-designed online safety features that resembled “nudges”, which provide real-time risk prevention and guidance.
A nudge is designed to alter people’s behavior through positive reinforcement without compromising their decision-making autonomy.
Teens came up with creative ideas for how to deal with online risks at different stages and from different points of view. They wanted to stop the risks from happening in the first place by prompting the risk perpetrators to reconsider their actions. They suggested ways to make them think twice before sending harmful messages, to automatically block their harmful content, or to penalize them for their actions. If the risks could not be prevented, teens also thought of ways to help with coping after the risk. They designed features that would warn them, filter out unwanted content, and guide them on what to do next. Finally, teens wanted safety not just for themselves but for the larger community, through features such public user ratings, which would incentivize behaving safely online.
Towards Collective Responsibility for Online Risks
Overall, we provide teen-centered design-based recommendations based on co-design with teens that break from the status quo of victim protection, emphasizing on risk prevention and teen empowerment, rather than treating teens like victims. To read more, check out our paper here: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3579625
This research was supported by the William T. Grant Foundation (#187941, #190017) and National Science Foundation under grants CHS-1844881.
