Logo image
Back
Assessing the Impact of Online Harassment on Youth Mental Health in Private Networked Spaces
Journal article   Open access

Assessing the Impact of Online Harassment on Youth Mental Health in Private Networked Spaces

Seunghyun Kim, Afsaneh Razi, Ashwaq Alsoubai, Pamela J. Wisniewski and Munmun De Choudhury
Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, v 18, pp 826-838
28 May 2024
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1609/icwsm.v18i1.31355
url
https://doi.org/10.1609/icwsm.v18i1.31355View
Published, Version of Record (VoR) Open

Abstract

Online harassment negatively impacts mental health, with victims expressing increased concerns such as depression, anxiety, and even increased risk of suicide, especially among youth and young adults. Yet, research has mainly focused on building automated systems to detect harassment incidents based on publicly available social media trace data, overlooking the impact of these negative events on the victims, especially in private channels of communication. Looking to close this gap, we examine a large dataset of private message conversations from Instagram shared and annotated by youth aged 13-21. We apply trained classifiers from online mental health to analyze the impact of online harassment on indicators pertinent to mental health expressions. Through a robust causal inference design involving a difference-in-differences analysis, we show that harassment results in greater expression of mental health concerns in victims up to 14 days following the incidents, while controlling for time, seasonality, and topic of conversation. Our study provides new benchmarks to quantify how victims perceive online harassment in the immediate aftermath of when it occurs. We make social justice-centered design recommendations to support harassment victims in private networked spaces. We caution that some of the paper's content could be triggering to readers.

Metrics

12 Record Views

Details

Logo image