Teenagers struggle to understand social media privacy and safety settings
"A Necessary Evil": Teenagers' Sensemaking of Privacy and Safety Settings on Social Media
Human-Computer Interaction
Summary
Teenagers use social media every day, but the settings meant to keep them safe and private are often confusing. The authors observed how teens tried to figure out these settings on platforms like Instagram and TikTok by relying on their habits and past experiences. They found that teens expect clear and reliable protections but often face unclear or inconsistent features. The paper suggests that simply looking at each privacy feature isn’t enough to ensure teens are truly protected, and platforms should prove that safety settings actually work over time.
What this means in practice
- •For social media designers: Improve platform design by providing clearer feedback when privacy and safety settings are activated and maintained for teenagers.
- •For user experience teams: Develop user interfaces that align with teenagers’ routines and expectations to help them better understand and trust safety features.
Authors
Jingxin Dong, Lingyun Chen, Chen Ling, Colin M. Gray
Abstract
Social media platforms are embedded in teenagers' daily lives, supporting friendship and identity while exposing teenagers to unwanted contact and privacy harms. Previous scholarship has documented how attention capture strategies and dark patterns shape social media use, and we extend this work to better understand platform settings that ostensibly provide privacy and safety protection. We report on think-aloud sessions with 11 teenagers aged 14 to 17 who completed six privacy and safety tasks on Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, and YouTube. We show how participants worked out what a setting meant through their routines, boundaries, and prior experiences, how they accommodated protections softer and less predictable than expected, and how they treated the platform as the authority on what protection should look like. We argue that feature-by-feature evaluation cannot establish whether teenagers are protected, and that platforms should carry the obligation to show that a protective action took effect and is durable.