Youth Trust in Social Media Companies and Expectations of Justice

Abstract

Social media platforms aspire to deliver fair resolutions after online harassment. Platforms rely on sanctions like removing content or banning users but these punitive responses provide little opportunity for justice or reparation for targets of harassment. This may be especially important for youth, who experience pervasive harassment which can have uniquely harmful effects on their wellbeing. We conducted a text-message based survey with 832 U.S. adolescents and young adults, ages 14-24, to explore their attitudes towards social media companies' responses to online harassment. We find that youth are twice as likely (41% versus 20%) not to trust social media companies' ability to achieve a fair resolution as they are to trust them. Nearly two-thirds (62%) of youth expressed a preference for an apology from the offender after online harassment, and they were twice as likely to prefer a private apology to a public one (29% versus 14%). Preferences also vary by identity, revealing how a one-size-fits-all approach can harm some youth while benefitting others. We reflect on the opportunities and risks associated with institutional trust and restorative justice for supporting youth who experience online harassment.

Understanding Instagram’s Deep Dive into Teen Mental Health

“…In relation to teens wanting more control over content to protect their wellbeing, this aligns with the work reported in (Charmaraman & Delcourt, 2021) where, through a series of workshops, negative aspects of social media were identified and then used to inform the co-design of prototypes. The issues of dealing with the bad behaviour of others on social media was mentioned within the previous section and, as identified in (Schoenebeck et al, 2021), appears more nuanced than simply focusing on punitive measures.…”

“…Within the HCI community, work considering online safety and related issues has primarily focused on children 12 years and younger, for example (Sanoubari et al, 2021;Hartikainen, Iivari & Kinnula, 2016;Webster1˒2 et al, 2015; Badillo-Urquiola et al, 2019). Related work from the wider HCI community includes (Schoenebeck et al, 2021) which explored experiences of social media companies' responses to online harassment with participants aged 14-24 (recruited via Facebook and Instagram). This work found that 41% of participants did not trust social media platforms to achieve fair resolutions for them but, of all the social media companies included in the survey, Instagram was the most trusted to achieve a fair resolution in the event of online bullying or harassment.…”

Fostering Communication

“…With the growth of online Social Networking Systems, researchers considered how youth use SNS [14], how that use might expose them to risks generally [40] as well as specific uses that might create risks [12,20], and the way youth think about mitigation or potential resolution of undesirable online problems [28,37]. While much work focused on problematic issues for youth participation online, other studies considered positive aspects of civic engagement [13,23], the development of online conflict resolution skills [24] and how interventions might reduce specific aspects of potential self-harm [34].…”

After Violation But Before Sanction: Understanding Volunteer Moderators' Profiling Processes Toward Violators in Live Streaming Communities

“…The need of understanding evidence collection in community moderation and the lack of framework in user profiling literature to understand violators indicate the potential of a new lens to build a connection between community moderation and profiling research. Additionally, much research also introduces various types of justice (e.g., social justice, retributive justice, restorative justice) from the criminal justice system to explain online harassment and moderation, and the justice-seeking process [2,21,60,61,70]. The inherent role of criminal profiling in the criminal justice system and its components (evidence collection and analysis, and the deduction of offender's characteristics) in the definition suggests that criminal profiling may serve as a good lens to understand mods' profiling process when they face potential violators at a conceptual level.…”