Kaitlyn Regehr
Researchers · University College London
UCL digital-humanities researcher whose 2024 algorithm-amplification report reached roughly 300 media outlets.
Kaitlyn Regehr is a digital-humanities researcher at University College London who studies how social media algorithms shape the content children and teens are shown online. Her 2024 report on algorithm amplification was picked up by roughly 300 media outlets, helping move the issue into mainstream debate, and she advises the UK's Children's Commissioner on related policy questions. Her 2025 book "Smartphone Nation" extends that research into a broader account of algorithm-driven, phone-based childhood in Britain, aimed at parents, educators, and policymakers alike.
Suicide and self-harm are complex and never caused by one factor alone. Problematic screen use, cyberbullying, harmful content, and online exploitation may increase risk or intensify existing distress. If someone is in immediate danger or emotional crisis in the United States, call or text 988.
WORKS IN THE LIBRARY (12)
BOOKS
Smartphone Nation: Why We're All Addicted to Our Screens and What You and Your Family Can Do About It
Smartphone Nation is UCL digital-humanities researcher Kaitlyn Regehr's 2025 book aimed at parents, educators, and policymakers navigating a phone-based childhood. Drawing on her own algorithm-amplification research, Regehr argues that not all screen time is equal: she proposes a 'digital nutrition' framework that ranks online activities from more passive, algorithm-driven consumption to more active creation and learning, and links heavy passive use to patterns she associates with reduced attention, poorer information judgment, and strained family relationships. The book explains how recommender systems are built to hold attention rather than serve users, walks through 'gaming your algorithm' techniques, and offers practical steps for building household media habits without treating all technology as equally harmful. TechKids Foundation includes it as an accessible synthesis of algorithm-literacy research for a general parent audience, not as a clinical guide.
Teens, Social Media, and Image-Based Abuse
Published by Palgrave Macmillan (Springer Nature) in 2025 and made freely available as an open-access title, Teens, Social Media, and Image-Based Abuse is a research monograph by Jessica Ringrose and Kaitlyn Regehr that consolidates roughly a decade of their UK school-based fieldwork on adolescents' experiences of unwanted sexual images, pressured sexting, and non-consensual image-sharing. The book extends their earlier reports and journal articles into a fuller account of how specific platform features are associated with normalized sexual harassment among teenagers, the gendered double standards that shape who is shamed and who is not, and what schools, parents, and platforms could do differently. TechKids Foundation includes it as the authors' most complete, book-length synthesis of this research program, aimed at researchers, educators, and policymakers rather than a general trade audience.
STUDIES
Safer Scrolling: How Algorithms Popularise and Gamify Online Hate and Misogyny for Young People
Safer Scrolling reports findings from a UCL/University of Kent study, led by Kaitlyn Regehr and conducted with the Association of School and College Leaders, on how TikTok's recommender system exposes teenage boys to misogynistic content. Researchers built four archetype accounts reflecting common teen vulnerabilities (loneliness, neurodiversity, dating-advice interest, and general disaffection) and tracked their 'For You' feeds over seven days, finding misogynistic content rose roughly fourfold within five days of use. Interviews with young people and roundtables with 25 school leaders linked this pattern to normalized sexist language in classrooms and, for a subset of vulnerable boys, to broader incel-community indicators the report associates with depression, isolation and, in some cases, self-harm and violence risk. The report calls for algorithmic accountability and 'healthy digital diet' education rather than outright bans. TechKids Foundation includes it as association-level evidence about algorithm design and youth misogyny exposure.
Understanding and Combatting Youth Experiences of Image-Based Sexual Harassment and Abuse
This UCL, University of Kent and School of Sexuality Education report, led by Jessica Ringrose with Kaitlyn Regehr and Betsy Milne, surveyed and held focus groups with 480 English secondary-school students aged 12 to 18 about unwanted sexual images and messages on Snapchat and Instagram. It found cyberflashing and pressure to send nude images had become widely normalized: most girls who received unwanted images described them as upsetting, yet the large majority never reported the incidents to a platform, parent, or school, most often because they doubted reporting would help. The authors coin 'image-based sexual harassment' and 'image-based sexual abuse' to distinguish these non-consensual practices from consensual teen sexting, and link platform features like Snapchat's disappearing messages and lack of identity checks to under-reporting. TechKids Foundation includes it as association-level evidence on how specific app design choices are linked to under-addressed sexual harassment among children.
In(cel)doctrination: How Technologically Facilitated Misogyny Moves Violence Off Screens and on to Streets
In this 2020 peer-reviewed study in New Media & Society, UCL researcher Kaitlyn Regehr draws on video ethnography and long-form interviews from a year-long documentary project to trace how online Incel ('involuntarily celibate') communities are associated with a pattern she describes as radicalization: young men experiencing loneliness are drawn into forums that Regehr's analysis links to escalating anger and, in a minority of cases, real-world violence. The paper proposes a five-step behavioral pattern by which she argues internet echo-chambers and the online celebration of past attackers reinforce this progression, and argues these patterns are identifiable and interceptable before they turn violent. TechKids Foundation includes this study as an early, peer-reviewed account of the association between online community dynamics and offline harm that later informed Regehr's TikTok algorithm research, not as proof that any single online community causes violence.
Normalizing Toxicity: The Role of Recommender Algorithms for Young People's Mental Health and Social Wellbeing
Published in Frontiers in Psychology in November 2025, this peer-reviewed paper by Kaitlyn Regehr and colleagues presents the academic, peer-reviewed analysis behind their 2024 'Safer Scrolling' report on TikTok's recommender system. Using the same mixed-methods design — archetype-account testing of over 1,000 videos plus interviews with young people and school leaders across England and Wales — the authors find that recommendation systems are associated with rapidly escalating exposure to gender-based-violence and misogynistic content framed as entertainment, and link this pattern to harms for young people's mental health and peer relationships. The paper argues that policy, education, and platform-design responses are all needed together. TechKids Foundation includes it as the formally peer-reviewed version of research earlier released as a policy report, adding academic-journal-level scrutiny to the same underlying dataset.
How UCL Research Helped Achieve the UK's First Cyberflashing Conviction
This March 2024 UCL News article reports that research led by Jessica Ringrose and Kaitlyn Regehr — documenting how cyberflashing among teenagers had become 'dangerously normalised,' with roughly half of affected teens telling no one — was cited in securing the United Kingdom's first conviction under the Online Safety Act's new cyberflashing offence. The article describes the researchers' survey finding that only a small share of affected teenagers reported incidents to a platform, parent, or school, and frames the conviction as evidence that academic research on youth image-based harassment can translate into real prosecutions. TechKids Foundation includes this as a documented example of a legal and policy outcome directly credited to a researcher's published work, consistent with UCL's own account of the case.
Screen Free Summer: Understanding Algorithms
In this July 2025 guest post for the Children's Commissioner for England's 'Screen Free Summer' series, Kaitlyn Regehr explains the 'attention economy' logic behind social media recommender systems — that platforms profit from engagement time rather than from any particular piece of content, which she argues is why algorithms are associated with surfacing misinformation and emotionally provocative material that holds attention longer than calmer content. She offers four concrete habits for families: deliberately seeking out enjoyable content to retrain an account's recommendations, treating likes and comments as a limited 'attention budget,' unfollowing accounts that lower wellbeing, and periodically clearing out uninspiring feeds. TechKids Foundation includes this piece as a government-body-published, practitioner-facing explainer of algorithm design aimed directly at parents, distinct from her peer-reviewed academic output on the same topic.
Screen Free Summer: Digital Diet Guidance
Published by the Children's Commissioner for England in August 2025, this piece by Kaitlyn Regehr argues that simple screen-time limits are a poor tool for managing children's technology use because they ignore what content is consumed and how, not just how long. Drawing on researcher Amy Orben's published framework, Regehr proposes a 'digital diet' model — similar to a food pyramid — that sorts online activity from more passive, algorithm-driven consumption at the top to more active creation and learning near the base, and suggests families keep a simple journal of usage and mood to identify patterns worth changing. TechKids Foundation includes this as a practical extension of Regehr's academic algorithm research into everyday family guidance published by a UK government children's-rights body.
Teen Girls' Experiences Negotiating the Ubiquitous Dick Pic: Sexual Double Standards and the Normalization of Image-Based Sexual Harassment
Published in the peer-reviewed journal Sex Roles in 2021, this study by Jessica Ringrose, Kaitlyn Regehr, and Sophie Whitehead draws on focus groups and arts-based methods with 144 English secondary-school students aged 11 to 18 to examine teen girls' experiences of receiving unsolicited sexual images. The authors find that receiving such images had become normalized among participants as an unwanted marker of a girl's perceived desirability, and that a sexual double standard meant girls faced social stigma for the images they received while boys who sent them typically did not — a dynamic the authors link to gendered pressure and reduced willingness to report incidents to a parent or school. TechKids Foundation includes this study as peer-reviewed evidence on the social and school-context harms associated with unsolicited image-sharing among children on phones and social apps.
Recognizing and Addressing How Gender Shapes Young People's Experiences of Image-Based Sexual Harassment and Abuse in Educational Settings
Published in the Journal of Social Issues in February 2023, this peer-reviewed paper by Jessica Ringrose and Kaitlyn Regehr analyzes focus-group and arts-based data from 150 young people aged 12 to 21 across England to examine how gender shapes adolescents' experiences of image-based sexual harassment and abuse. The authors argue that pressure on girls to send nude images functions as harassment, while pressure on boys to obtain and non-consensually share such images constitutes a distinct form of abuse, and that sexual double standards leave girls disproportionately shamed and blamed when images circulate. The paper concludes that school relationships-and-sex-education policy would benefit from adopting this combined harassment-and-abuse framework rather than treating all sexting as equally risky. TechKids Foundation includes it as peer-reviewed evidence linking specific platform-mediated behaviors to gendered social and school-based harms among children.