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Teens face immense challenges navigating a digital ecosystem designed to push algorithmically ordained content that boosts engagement while undermining their privacy, health, and safety. Professor Nora McDonald and her PhD students are attempting to understand better the “for you” landscape that is actively shaping teen (and adult) reality with three papers that appeared at the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) CHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.
Given changes to our politics, laws, and the spread of misinformation on the internet, reproductive health information literacy has always been a challenge, even as more teens go online. Professor McDonald’s PhD students, Umama Dewan and Cora Sula, wanted to know how already embattled teens cope in the post-Roe era with navigating the reproductive health online information ecosystem and their privacy.
Their qualitative interview study with teens was presented and published at the 2024 CHI conference in Honolulu Hawaii in a paper called “Teen Reproductive Health Information Seeking and Sharing Post-Roe.”
Dewan, who was a fourth-year student in the Department of Computer Science and Sula, who was in her first year in the Department of Information Science and Technology, undertook qualitative interviews with teens from across the United States to learn about how they find and share reproductive health information, and what privacy strategies they use when doing so. They learned that teens care a lot about finding good information about their reproductive health, going to reputable sources, and cross-checking articles they find, despite struggling with rampant misinformation.
When it comes to their privacy, however, teens are not always as circumspect, showing deep concern for their digital data only when they perceive immediate risk because of where they live or because of their stage of life.
Dewan and Sula were inspired by the finding that health risk and privacy are closely linked. They see the future for reproductive health information focusing on both health and digital literacy and want to explore the design of applications that can better accommodate these literacies.
Both students were thrilled to be presenting their paper at the premier conference for Human-computer Interaction (HCI) this year in Hawaii along with McDonald. McDonald was a conference Chair who had two other papers that were presented at this venue, one of which focused on privacy post-Roe in an ever more complex and customized digital landscape and another on teen self-perceptions and digital literacy in relationship to social media “for you” algorithms. Her research on teens was recently featured in The Conversation.
McDonald has also been working with Sula on research with teens about their general awareness and concerns about algorithms. They held a workshop at CSCW 2023 “AI through the Eyes of Gen Z: Setting a Research Agenda for Emerging Technologies that Empower Our Future Generations ” and will have a piece about their work in the ACM Interaction journal (forthcoming).
McDonald says that “privacy-invasive customized algorithmic ecosystems are here to stay. So, it’s critical HCI and Computer Science scholars help Gen Z and Alpha (current and future adult citizens) with algorithm awareness so that they can understand why they are seeing the toxic content or the misinformation they are seeing, and the privacy-invasive algorithms behind it.”