Teen Vigilance: Navigating Risky Social Interactions on Discord

Paper Title

Teen Vigilance: Navigating Risky Social Interactions on Discord

Publication Info

• Topic area: Teenagers’ online safety strategies in social platforms, focusing on Discord.
• Keywords: Discord, teenagers, online safety, vigilance, risk navigation, social platforms, moderation, privacy, community governance.

Background and Problem

• Problem / challenge: Discord’s hybrid environment of private, semi-private, and public spaces creates unique safety risks for teenagers, which are underexplored compared to other platforms like Instagram or TikTok. Prior research has focused on risks but not on how teenagers themselves mitigate them.
• Significance: Understanding teenagers’ strategies for navigating risks on Discord is critical for improving their online safety and informing teen-centered platform designs.
• Motivation and related work: Previous studies have addressed risks on platforms like Instagram and Snapchat, emphasizing resilience and parental mediation. However, Discord-specific risks, such as grooming, scams, and exposure to harmful content, remain underexamined, particularly in terms of teenagers’ proactive strategies.

Solution

• Proposed approach: Investigating teenagers’ strategies for navigating risky social interactions on Discord through semi-structured interviews and Reflexive Thematic Analysis (RTA).
• Novelty:
  1. Introduces the concept of teenagers’ vigilance as a proactive safety strategy.
  2. Highlights community-level risk mitigation through selective participation and engagement with governance structures.
  3. Provides teen-centered design implications for safer online environments.
• Procedure and key techniques:
  • Conducted 16 semi-structured interviews with teenagers aged 13–17 in the U.S. who use Discord and have experienced risky interactions.
  • Analyzed transcripts using RTA to identify patterns in teenagers’ safety practices.
  • Developed themes around interpersonal and community-level risk navigation.

Results

• Concrete findings:
  • Teenagers navigate interpersonal risks by recognizing suspicious cues, using restrictive features like blocking, and engaging in controlled risk-taking for entertainment.
  • At the community level, they assess server cultures, set privacy boundaries, and contribute to moderation processes.
• Advantage over baselines: Provides a nuanced understanding of teenagers’ proactive strategies, contrasting with prior research that emphasized resilience or external interventions like parental mediation.
• Experiments / evaluation:
  • Recruitment included diverse platforms and methods, resulting in 16 valid participants.
  • Interviews lasted an average of 35 minutes, focusing on teenagers’ experiences with risky interactions and safety tools.
  • Themes were developed iteratively through RTA, prioritizing data richness over saturation.
• Limitations and future work:
  • Recruitment challenges due to IRB restrictions and limited diversity in the sample.
  • Findings are specific to Discord and may not generalize to other platforms.
  • Future research could explore quantitative analyses or algorithmic moderation features.

Summary

This study investigates how teenagers navigate risky social interactions on Discord, revealing their proactive strategies of vigilance at both individual and community levels. Teenagers balance privacy and security concerns with social motivations, using tools like blocking and message filters, assessing server cultures, and engaging in moderation processes. Findings highlight the importance of teen-centered designs to enhance safety tools and empower teenagers’ agency. The study contributes to understanding teenagers’ online safety practices and offers actionable design implications for platforms to support safer social environments.