Collective Privacy Sensemaking of Everyday Lived Experiences: A Study of Reddit and Discord Teen Communities

Paper Title

Collective Privacy Sensemaking of Everyday Lived Experiences: A Study of Reddit and Discord Teen Communities

Publication Info

• Topic area: Teen privacy and collective sensemaking in online communities.
• Keywords: Teen privacy, online communities, Reddit, Discord, privacy literacy, collective sensemaking, peer support, privacy education, interpersonal privacy, digital resilience.

Background and Problem

• Problem / challenge: Existing research on teen privacy focuses heavily on risks, harm prevention, and protection, with limited exploration of how teens actively seek privacy-related information and make decisions in their daily lives. Few studies address how teens use online peer communities to navigate privacy challenges.
• Significance: Understanding how teens engage with online communities to address privacy concerns can inform the design of platforms and educational interventions that better support their privacy literacy and autonomy.
• Motivation and related work: Prior work has examined privacy education, risk management, and the role of social media in shaping privacy behaviors. However, the role of informal, peer-driven online interactions in fostering privacy understanding remains underexplored. This study builds on these gaps by analyzing teen interactions on Reddit and Discord.

Solution

• Proposed approach: A qualitative analysis of 428 posts and messages from two teen-focused online communities (Reddit and Discord) to examine how teens collectively make sense of privacy-related issues.
• Novelty:
  1. Demonstrates how online peer communities fill informational gaps that caregivers cannot, fostering privacy self-efficacy and resilience.
  2. Explores how platform affordances (e.g., asynchronous vs. real-time communication) shape privacy-related peer interactions.
  3. Frames privacy management as a collective sensemaking process, challenging the view of privacy as a solitary task.
• Procedure and key techniques:
  • Data collection: Posts and messages were gathered from a Reddit subreddit and its affiliated Discord server, focusing on entries containing the term "privacy."
  • Qualitative content analysis: Structural and descriptive coding identified patterns in privacy concerns, responses, and peer interactions.
  • Ethical measures: Anonymization, paraphrasing, and reverse-search tests were employed to protect participants' privacy.

Results

• Concrete findings:
  • 73% of privacy concerns were interpersonal, primarily involving parents (303 entries), followed by siblings, romantic partners, and peers.
  • Teens described indirect responses to privacy breaches, such as protecting information, circumventing controls, and seeking peer advice.
  • Teens engaged in casual discussions, debates, and storytelling to share strategies, unpack legal and moral issues, and denounce misinformation.
• Advantage over baselines: Unlike prior studies relying on interviews or surveys, this study captures teens' organic, real-time conversations, offering nuanced insights into their lived experiences and peer-driven interactions.
• Experiments / evaluation:
  • Dataset: 428 entries (229 from Reddit, 199 from Discord) collected from May–August 2024.
  • Analysis focused on three research questions: sources of privacy concerns, teens' responses, and the role of online communities in privacy sensemaking.
  • Metrics: Frequency of privacy concerns by source, types of responses, and thematic patterns in discussions.
• Limitations and future work:
  • Limited generalizability to non-Western, non-English-speaking contexts.
  • Reliance on self-reported age and contextual cues to identify teen users.
  • Potential misinformation and toxic behaviors in online communities.
  • Future work should explore longitudinal outcomes of collective sensemaking and AI-mediated interventions in online communities.

Summary

This study investigates how teens use Reddit and Discord to collectively make sense of privacy-related issues. The findings reveal that teens frequently discuss interpersonal privacy concerns, particularly involving parents, and employ indirect strategies to address breaches. Online communities serve as venues for sharing strategies, debating legal and moral issues, and fostering privacy literacy through storytelling and peer support. While these platforms empower teens to navigate privacy challenges, they also pose risks such as misinformation and toxic behaviors. The study highlights the potential of online peer interactions to complement formal privacy education and calls for platform designs that support collective sensemaking while mitigating risks.