From "Fail Fast" to "Mature Safely:" Expert Perspectives as Secondary Stakeholders on Teen-Centered Social Media Risk Detection

Paper Title

From 'Fail Fast' to 'Mature Safely:' Expert Perspectives as Secondary Stakeholders on Teen-Centered Social Media Risk Detection

Publication Info

• Topic area: Teen-centered social media risk detection and online safety technology evaluation.
• Keywords: Teen-centered design, social media risks, online safety, risk detection dashboard, secondary stakeholders, privacy, AI transparency, youth empowerment, HCI, multi-stakeholder evaluation.

Background and Problem

• Problem / challenge: Existing social media risk detection technologies are often parent-centered or platform-based, lacking public evaluation and youth input, leading to high false-positive rates and dissatisfaction among teens. These systems typically follow a "fail fast" paradigm, addressing flaws only after deployment, which can harm vulnerable youth.
• Significance: Addressing online risks like cyberbullying, sexual solicitation, and harassment is critical for teen safety, especially as social media usage grows. A proactive approach is needed to ensure technologies are robust before deployment.
• Motivation and related work: Prior research has developed algorithmic risk detection models but has not operationalized them into teen-facing tools or evaluated their real-world viability. Expanding stakeholder involvement beyond the family unit is necessary to identify practical challenges and align interests for sustainable solutions.

Solution

• Proposed approach: The study evaluates MOSafely, a teen-centered social media risk detection dashboard, through expert feedback from secondary stakeholders (researchers, practitioners, and industry professionals).
• Novelty:
  1. Development and evaluation of MOSafely, a functional dashboard for teen-centered risk detection.
  2. Identification of five key tensions in implementing and sustaining teen-centered risk detection technologies.
  3. Re-examination of "teen-centered" design to include multi-stakeholder perspectives.
  4. Practical roadmap for addressing technical, social, and economic challenges in youth online safety.
• Procedure and key techniques:
  • Co-designed with teens and refined through a Youth Advisory Board.
  • Conducted semi-structured online interviews with 33 online safety experts.
  • Analyzed feedback using inductive thematic analysis to identify strengths, weaknesses, and tensions.

Results

• Concrete findings:
  • Strengths: Clear design, teen agency through risk categorization and feedback features.
  • Weaknesses: Usability barriers in data transfer and lack of clarity in risk definitions and AI analysis.
  • Classifier performance: Accuracy ranged from 60% to 89%, F1 scores from 63% to 90%, depending on risk type and model.
• Advantage over baselines: Moves beyond parent-centered and platform-based models by empowering teens and incorporating their feedback into risk detection.
• Experiments / evaluation:
  • Participants: 33 experts (10 researchers, 11 practitioners, 12 industry professionals) with an average career duration of 20 years.
  • Methods: Video demonstration of MOSafely, followed by interviews focusing on early feedback and implementation tensions.
  • Metrics: Usability, clarity, privacy concerns, and alignment with teen needs.
• Limitations and future work:
  • Did not involve teens directly; future work will validate findings with teen users.
  • Feedback was based on a video demo with simulated data, not a live system.
  • Future plans include staged consent protocols and metrics for intervention utility.

Summary

This study evaluates MOSafely, a teen-centered social media risk detection dashboard, through interviews with 33 online safety experts. While experts praised the dashboard’s clarity and support for teen agency, they identified barriers such as cumbersome data transfer and opaque risk definitions. Five tensions were revealed, including conflicts between objective and context-dependent risk definitions, privacy concerns, and financial sustainability. The findings call for rethinking "teen-centered" design to include multi-stakeholder perspectives and propose a shift from a "fail fast" to a "mature safely" paradigm. The study provides a roadmap for addressing technical, social, and economic challenges to ensure effective and sustainable youth online safety solutions.