Advisory

Teenagers and Unwanted Sexual Advances in Social Media Messaging

Nov 2023 🇺🇸 arturobejar.org

One of a set of supporting policy documents Béjar published alongside his 2023 Senate testimony, this essay focuses specifically on unwanted sexual advances teens receive through direct messages on social platforms, which he describes as common rather than rare. He proposes a recipient-centered reporting design: a simple way for a teen to flag unwanted contact, with the platform using that signal to give private feedback to the sender and to escalate consequences only for people who repeat the behavior after being told it was unwelcome. He also includes practical guidance aimed at parents. Drawing on his own team's past work at Facebook, he writes that giving senders private, respectful feedback changed behavior in roughly half of nudged cases without any account penalty.

~50% behavior change from private feedback

Béjar writes that in roughly half of the cases where his former Facebook team gave a sender private feedback about unwanted contact, the sender changed their behavior with no account penalty applied.

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CITATION

Bejar, Arturo. 'Teenagers and Unwanted Sexual Advances in Social Media Messaging.' Supporting document, arturobejar.org, published with Senate testimony, November 7, 2023.

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