"A Necessary Evil": Teenagers' Sensemaking of Privacy and Safety Settings on Social Media

2026-09-23

AI Summary

This study addresses adolescents’ difficulty in assessing the actual protective efficacy of social media privacy settings and the influence of platform dark patterns. Employing a think-aloud protocol, this work observes eleven adolescents performing privacy-related tasks across four major social media platforms to analyze how they interpret the boundaries of privacy settings based on everyday experience. The findings reveal that adolescents tend to perceive platforms as authoritative protectors, relying on prior experiences to navigate unpredictable protection mechanisms. Consequently, this paper argues that feature-by-feature evaluation is insufficient to substantiate the effectiveness of privacy protections. Instead, it advocates for shifting the burden of proof onto platforms, requiring them to demonstrate that their protective measures are both genuinely effective and durable over time.

Abstract

Social media platforms are embedded in teenagers' daily lives, supporting friendship and identity while exposing teenagers to unwanted contact and privacy harms. Previous scholarship has documented how attention capture strategies and dark patterns shape social media use, and we extend this work to better understand platform settings that ostensibly provide privacy and safety protection. We report on think-aloud sessions with 11 teenagers aged 14 to 17 who completed six privacy and safety tasks on Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, and YouTube. We show how participants worked out what a setting meant through their routines, boundaries, and prior experiences, how they accommodated protections softer and less predictable than expected, and how they treated the platform as the authority on what protection should look like. We argue that feature-by-feature evaluation cannot establish whether teenagers are protected, and that platforms should carry the obligation to show that a protective action took effect and is durable.

Problem

• teenagers
• privacy settings
• safety settings
• social media
• sensemaking

Innovation

• Privacy Settings
• Sensemaking
• Dark Patterns
• Think-aloud
• Teenagers