Social media safety settings for teens often hard to find and use
Available but Not Usable: Dark Patterns and Interaction Cost in Social Media Privacy and Safety Settings for Teens
Human-Computer Interaction
Summary
Social media sites give teenagers controls to protect their privacy and safety, but these controls can be confusing or tricky to use. The authors studied how teens tried to change settings on popular apps like TikTok and Instagram and found many obstacles, including confusing designs called dark patterns. These make it harder for teenagers to benefit from protections that are technically available. The authors suggest combining expert checks with user testing to better spot where settings are too hard to use.
What this means in practice
- •For mobile app developers: Improve the design of privacy and safety controls by identifying confusing steps and dark patterns that increase user effort.
- •For user experience designers: Use wayfinding audits combining expert and user testing to create more accessible and durable privacy features for teenage users.
Authors
Jingxin Dong, Lingyun Chen, Chen Ling, Colin M. Gray
Abstract
Social media platforms are central to teenagers' lives, and their designs can expose users to privacy, safety, and wellbeing harms. Platforms increasingly offer protective settings, though the presence of a control reveals little about whether teenagers can find, use, and benefit from it over time. We paired an expert evaluation of six privacy and safety tasks across TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, and YouTube with moderated think aloud sessions in which 11 teenagers aged 14 to 17 attempted the tasks. Interaction cost and dark patterns analysis allowed us to compare the complexity designed into each task with the effort participants incurred as they located, configured, and interpreted controls. Recurring dark patterns appeared across tasks, and most participant attempts exceeded the expert baseline. Protective settings therefore risk being insufficiently usable or durable in practice, and we propose a wayfinding audit that integrates expert evaluation, usability testing, interaction cost, and dark pattern analysis.