Examining Youth Online Safety and Well-Being Through the Lens of Social Media Affordances

Abstract

Social media has become a fundamental part of adolescents’ lives. Yet the effect of its use on their well-being remains debatable, as prior research shows a lack of consensus, with studies identifying effects in both positive and negative directions. A key limitation in existing literature is the tendency to treat social media as a single, uniform entity when examining its risks and benefits. Much prior work has focused on how use frequency or intensity relates to outcomes, often overlooking how specific platform design components shape these outcomes. This generalized approach obscures how different platforms offer distinct patterns of engagement that may lead to varying experiences. Without accounting for these differences, it becomes difficult to identify which aspects of social media are responsible for particular risks or benefits. Understanding how the design influences user experiences is therefore critical for developing interventions that move beyond addressing harmful outcomes alone and instead target the underlying inputs and pathways that contribute to those outcomes. To address these limitations, this dissertation adopts an affordance-based approach to examine online safety and well-being among youth. Affordances refer to the perceived possibilities for action offered by a technology, including how platform features enable or constrain user behavior. In the context of social media, an affordance-based perspective helps explain how youth navigate, experience, and respond to platform design. Applying this lens moves the discussion beyond broad risk-and-benefit debates and provides a clearer conceptual framework for identifying design choices that reduce harm and support positive use. Additionally, rather than focusing on temporary characteristics such as platform popularity, this approach targets replicable technological qualities, allowing findings and interventions to remain applicable, thereby improving generalizability as platforms evolve over time. Across four studies, this dissertation first conducts a systematic literature review of prior research to develop an affordance-centered framework that maps how platform features relate to user activities, the affordances they enable, and associated benefits and risks. It then examines youth support-seeking experiences across seven social media platforms to show how affordances in different contexts shape outcomes. Next, it turns to private channels to show how conversational settings shape both youth disclosures and the responses they receive. Finally, it uses participatory co-design to translate these insights into affordance-informed recommendations for improving youth online safety and well-being.