Want to Keep Teens Safe Online? Listen to Them

Michal Luria is a Research Fellow at the Center for Democracy & Technology and holds a doctorate in human-computer interaction from Carnegie Mellon University. Aliya Bhatia is a Policy Analyst at the Center for Democracy & Technology’s Free Expression Project. Shutterstock Earlier this week, members of the Senate Judiciary Committee held another hearing on the harms young people face online, including sexual solicitation, misogyny, and links to buy drugs. In response, Senators are proposing draconian restrictions on teens’ access to content or entire online services, mandatory parental surveillance, while some state lawmakers even prefer digital curfews.  However, young people, it turns out, have a thing or two to say about how to keep themselves safe online. We know because we asked them. In new research by the Center for Democracy & Technology, we spoke with 32 people between the ages of 14 and 21 to understand how they feel about unwanted messages online and how they keep themselves safe. The young people we spoke to define “unwanted, unpleasant, or concerning” messages as unsolicited messages that come from strangers, including sexual content. We asked them to submit a diary entry every time they received an unwanted message and found that these were not equally distributed. Participants in the study received as many as seven unwanted interactions over three weeks, six participants received only one message and seven received none at all.  “I feel like people vastly overestimate how many unwanted messages we get on platforms,” said one participant. “The risks and…Want to Keep Teens Safe Online? Listen to Them