The Engagement-Prolonging Designs Teens Encounter on Very Large Online Platforms

2024-11-18

AI Summary

This study investigates how large online platforms employ interface design to extend adolescents’ online duration and engagement. Method: Drawing on a systematic audit of 17 Very Large Online Platforms (VLOPs), the research integrates structured content analysis, ethnographic-style interface auditing conducted while simulating adolescent user identities, qualitative coding, and cross-platform comparative analysis. Contribution/Results: It introduces the first four-tiered typology of “engagement prolongation effects” targeting adolescents—coercion, inducement, entrapment, and hypnotic design—identifying 63 concrete mechanisms and coding 583 real-world design instances (with social media platforms accounting for twice as many instances as other VLOPs combined). The study empirically models three synergistic design configurations and releases the first publicly available, video-annotated graphical dataset documenting these practices. These findings provide theoretical grounding and empirical evidence to support Digital Services Act (DSA) compliance assessments and digital well-being interventions.

Technology Category

• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Multiagent Systems: Mechanism Design
• Humans and AI: Interaction Techniques and Devices

Application Category

• Responsible Web: Social and technical mechanisms of refusal for web technologies and applications
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Web data quality in the era of algorithmically-generated content
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Economics and fairness of platforms and recommendation systems

Abstract

In the attention economy, online platforms are incentivized to design products that maximize user engagement, even when such practices conflict with users' best interests. We conducted a structured content analysis of all Very Large Online Platforms (VLOPs) to identify the designs these influential apps and sites use to capture attention and extend engagement. Specifically, we conducted this analysis posing as a teenager to identify the designs that young people are exposed to. We find that VLOPs use four strategies to extend teens' use: pressuring, enticing, trapping, and lulling them into spending more time online. We report on a hierarchical taxonomy organizing the 63 designs that fall under these categories. Applying this taxonomy to all 17 VLOPs, we identify 583 instances of engagement-prolonging designs, with social media platforms using twice as many as other VLOPs. We present three vignettes illustrating how these designs reinforce one another in practice. We further contribute a graphical dataset of videos illustrating these features in the wild.

Problem

• Online Engagement
• Platform Design
• Middle School Students

Innovation

• Online Platform Strategies
• Adolescent Engagement
• Empirical Video Evidence