New Report Explores Evolving Landscape of Digital Youth Wellbeing
New Report Explores Evolving Landscape of Digital Youth Wellbeing
The Stanford Youth Safety and Digital Wellbeing Report addresses the increasingly complex conversation around social media and youth wellbeing.
The Stanford Youth Safety and Digital Wellbeing Report addresses the increasingly complex conversation around social media and youth well-being.
As researchers, policymakers, and industry leaders work to understand the true scope of potential harms and benefits of social media, many questions remain about how these risks are defined, measured, and addressed in practice. How do different harms impact young people? How common are each of these harms? And how can we balance safety measures with broader considerations including privacy, free speech, and technological innovation?
To explore these questions, the Center for Digital Health (CDH) and Social Media Lab (SML) at Stanford University convened a workshop bringing together experts from diverse fields, including policy, public health, pediatrics, education, mental health, and industry. The output of the workshop is the Integrated Harm Framework (IHF), which provides concrete recommendations on three dimensions critical to implementation of risk-based approaches for online harms:
(a) A taxonomy of specific potential harms for youth users;
(b) Methods for measuring the the prevalence and severity of each harm;
(c) Strategies for measuring the effectiveness of mitigation efforts.
The report summarizes the key insights from the workshop, shedding light on the evolving landscape of youth digital wellbeing.
Key messages of this report include:
Harm-specific strategies are crucial. Efforts to improve digital safety and wellbeing must distinguish between different types of harm—such as bullying/harassment, exposure to harmful content, or displacement of healthy activities—rather than pursuing one-size-fits-all solutions.
Measurement matters. For each specific harm, assessing both prevalence and severity can guide prioritization and inform definitions of success; but current data are often inconsistent or incomplete across platforms and jurisdictions, with different metrics that are hard to compare with each other or to reconcile with population-level prevalence surveys from governments and NGOs.
Regulators need consistent benchmarks. Consistent guidelines can immediately help implement existing legislation more effectively. For example, the release in late 2024 of the first risk assessments mandated by the EU DSA demonstrated inconsistent approaches by platforms.
- Better metrics benefit all stakeholders. Consistent guidelines can help platforms meet regulatory requirements and inform voluntary efforts; empower parents and youth with a more complete understanding of risks, allowing for more intentional and informed approaches to online usage, while enabling more effective research and policymaking
Rather than considering the harms of social media use as a single group, the report critically examines youth-specific harms and outlines ways to measure and mitigate these harms. The report concludes with specific recommendations for policymakers, technology companies, academics, and parents and families, emphasizing the importance of youth-centered design and cross-sector collaboration.
