For researchers looking to collect data about children interacting with online platforms, federal and some state privacy laws limit the collection and sharing of certain information about individuals under the age of 13; this may affect researchers’ ability to collect data directly from children as well as different platforms’ willingness to allow researchers to create mechanisms to collect that data.³³² Current evidence suggests that both passive and active social media use are associated with depression, anxiety,^{333 334 335 336} and suicide ^{337 338} among specific groups of adolescents. Future studies can build on this body of research to clarify what makes social media use problematic (or not) for whom among youth.

The Task Force recommends a research agenda that identifies design features and usage patterns that contribute to harms and identifies design features that support youth well-being in the dynamic online environment, including the quality of friendships, self-esteem, interpersonal relationships, sleep, mental health attention span, and various other outcomes of interest.

OVERARCHING GOALS AND OBJECTIVES OF THE RESEARCH AGENDA

In shaping a research agenda, it is important to acknowledge that societal concerns about the health, safety, and privacy of youth who use digital and social media encompass a broad spectrum of interests and concerns. The purpose of this research agenda is to identify where there is a critical need to build on existing literature and to facilitate new lines of inquiry that will begin to address these concerns and provide empirical evidence on which programs, practices, and policies can build.
The research agenda is arranged according to

1. research objectives,
2. domain-specific research topics, and
3. research approaches and methods.

These should support the well-being of children, including their mental health, safety, privacy, self-esteem, quality friendships and relationships, and other outcomes.

OVERARCHING RECOMMENDED OBJECTIVES

1. Develop and evaluate scalable interventions to protect children’s online health, safety, and privacy.
   Future research opportunities should prioritize evaluating the efficacy of interventions that can be deployed at scale. Which parental strategies and technical controls will help ensure children’s online health, safety, and privacy? Which strategies for protecting safety also protect the privacy necessary to support children’s development as independent and autonomous individuals, while also maintaining trusted relationships with parents and caregivers? How do privacy violations, such as loss of control over images, affect children’s mental health? How does surveillance by parents and caregivers affect children’s mental health? What types of digital literacy interventions are effective, in both the short- and the long-term, and can be successfully implemented for all students across school districts? Particular attention should be paid to experimental designs that follow students throughout their development.
2. Continue to study harms associated with children’s exposure to online platforms, and intersections with risks. 
   Given that online platforms are deeply integrated into the lives of youth today, future research should center on understanding harms, and the various factors that contribute to them, in both the online and physical environment, which are no longer mutually exclusive domains, rather than assuming that all harms begin and end online.
3. Broaden access to platform data and algorithms.
   Research on how digital technologies and platforms affect youth faces significant challenges due to a lack of key information related to how platforms are used (e.g., patterns of usage time and forms, such as active versus passive) and designed (e.g., methods of procuring, applying, and securing user engagement information and behavioral data, and safety design that leverages advancements in AI and machine learning). Stated differently, data about “algorithmic design and operation should be of sufficient granularity to allow researchers to understand when, why, and how users are shown different types of content.”³³⁹
4. Understand child development as encompassing individual differences and contextual factors.
   Studies need to examine the differential impacts of the digital world, defining and assessing risk and protective factors. We need to better understand what is good, neutral, and/or bad for different individuals and groups of individuals (e.g., age groups, disability status, race/ethnicity, etc.). Additionally, studies need to incorporate contextual factors. These may include peer behaviors and social connections; parental digital behavior and its impacts; parental monitoring or digital restriction practices; influence of parenting styles; influence of parents’ work environments; and school and community norms and influences. Research is also needed on the importance of privacy for children’s development, including mental, physical, and emotional development.

RESEARCH TOPICS AND DOMAINS OF INTEREST

The Task Force identified crucial research topics and domains of interest that reflect the current trend and gaps in scholarship related to online platform use and its impact on mental and physical health, safety, and privacy. Given the evolving landscape of research and the pressing need to translate science to practical guidance for children and youth, parents, clinical providers, and policymakers, we present select areas of research that we can strategically build upon.

MENTAL AND PHYSICAL HEALTH AND WELL-BEING RESEARCH PRIORITIES

• Multidisciplinary research that focuses on a holistic view of youth well-being. Mental health is integrated into other health domains and therefore should not be studied in isolation. It is influenced by and influences other health outcomes like physical health, sleep health, cognitive function, and academic learning and achievement. Given the complex relationship between youth and technology, it is important that studies bring together epistemologies that include brain development, psychology, physical health, education, computer science, social interactions, social determinants of health, and societal influences.
• Research that ensures a lifespan perspective with comparisons across different age groups, from infancy to emerging adulthood with the use of measures that are age-appropriate. This also requires foundational research on digital and social media use and their impacts on youth mental health that addresses developmental mechanisms/processes and trajectories.
• Longitudinal studies that consider the potential causal impact of the digital world on children and youth well-being and social, emotional, and cognitive development as well as their mental and physical health. What is a healthy use and what is an unhealthy use, for whom and in what contexts? How do different kinds of surveillance by platforms, peers, or parents and caregivers impact youth well-being and social, emotional, and cognitive development as well as their mental and physical health? Which specific design features are harmful or beneficial, and which lead to more or less usage over time?
• Data-informed theories and conceptual models to address how digital and social media exposure and usage impact developmental trajectories and health outcomes for youth from infancy and early childhood through adolescence and emerging adulthood. Such research would address parenting styles and caregiving practices, economic resources, and diverse cultural backgrounds, including race and ethnicity, sex and gender, sexual orientation and gender identity, language(s) spoken in the home, and disability status. Questions of interest include how digital and social media exposure and usage affect empathy/compassion; social or emotional competence; executive function; self-regulation; language development, early literacy, and numeracy skills; attention and memory processes; motivation; identity; creativity; gross and fine motor function; physical development and health; activity level; sleep; and weight status.
• Core components or constructs of technology that will remain relevant as technology changes. Research tool and metric development is needed to effectively measure youth behavior across a dynamic landscape of apps, platforms, and technologies, as well as impact on their mental health, physical health, and well-being.
• Emerging technologies. Since research on youth and emerging technologies tends to lag behind what youth, schools, parents, and communities have access to and are engaging with, there is an urgency to ensure that research is keeping up with the rapid pace of technological development, especially to ensure youth health, safety, and privacy. For example, recent innovations in virtual reality, voice recognition, and AI are poised to have major impacts on youth interactions with their digital ecosystem, yet research in this area is nascent.
• The impact of varying levels of exposure. Research on the impacts of exposure levels— such as the amount of time spent online, differences depending on the time of day for usage, benefits of breaks, passive or active engagement online, performative or exploratory use, and other factors—may help better identify and understand the impacts of exposure on sleep, mental health, and other outcomes.
• Prevalence studies of youth across development experiencing online harassment, abuse, cyberbullying, and sexual exploitation and the nature of those harms on online platforms, including updates to key federal data sets and public health surveillance tools that measure youth well-being.
• Clinical research examining when, whether, and under what circumstances, an individual’s engagement with computer-generated material, including CSAM, could result in harm, the nature of those harms, and the long-term impacts, including means to mitigating the harms.
• Evaluation research on existing programs designed to address online safety to determine which aspects of these programs yield positive outcomes and which aspects do not.
• Experimental designs randomizing types of safety messages, and other prevention programming, among youth populations and adults to determine the effectiveness of these messages in changing youth attitudes, behaviors, and decision-making.
• Contextual factors that increase risk for, and fortification against, the sexual exploitation and abuse of children and youth online. This includes assessing the impact of race, ethnicity, socio-economic status, disability status, sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity on the identification, and response to, child sexual exploitation and abuse victims and provision of services.
• Best practices to help prevent the sexual exploitation and abuse of youth online, with particular attention paid to the content of prevention messaging and to the individuals (e.g., law enforcement, school-based professionals, parents, youth leaders, etc.) best positioned to deliver that messaging.

PRIVACY RESEARCH PRIORITIES

• Privacy risk profile of youth over stages of development. Chronological age is currently used as the primary policy and technological benchmark for determining when an individual is developmentally ready for a variety of tasks, the privacy risks that children or teens face, and the best ways to tailor policies to youth development. However, is age the best metric for differentiating the risks that youth face in diverse contexts? What are alternative metrics to consider in policy-making spaces? How can protections and controls be developmentally tailored for parents?
• Policy and practice standards on children’s online usage and health. There have been several state-level laws implemented with respect to children online. These are natural experiments being run in the laboratories of democracy, and data should be carefully collected. Researchers should study the effects of any federal policy affecting children online. More research should also be done on the uptake of standards in practice and the effectiveness of standards in supporting youth well-being. Research and evaluations on the effectiveness of laws that have been passed in other countries affecting children online (e.g., Online Safety Act in the UK, Online Safety Act in Australia, and Digital Services Act in the EU) should be conducted.
• Long-term and systemic risks of privacy considerations. Specific areas of inquiry include: What is the relationship between children’s perception of surveillance and their mental health? Additionally, what is the impact of constant surveillance from their peers, including on the mental health and development of children and youth? Does a lack of privacy affect children’s activities in the long term or does it increase the prevalence of privacy cynicism?³⁴⁰ How do privacy attitudes and privacy education interventions in childhood affect identity theft rates in adulthood?
• Efficacy and effectiveness of privacy protections for children. No longer can Internet privacy concerns focus solely on personal interactions with a computer or phone. A variety of current and developing technologies, including smart speakers, toys, and other household objects, pose privacy threats. Common household items such as toasters, thermostats, and door locks often have the ability to gather user information and transmit it online in what is called the Internet of Things.³⁴¹, ³⁴² Wi-Fi antennas may have the ability to sense where a person is in their home.³⁴³ AI chatbots gather information from their users for further training.³⁴⁴ Technological change is happening quickly. What distinct privacy risks do these new technologies and business models pose? What legal frameworks are necessary to ensure children’s privacy in these new markets and products?
• Effects of ubiquitous computer use in schools. Educational technology, which became omnipresent during the COVID-19 pandemic, can pose privacy risks for children.³⁴⁵, ³⁴⁶ What are the continued effects on children of educational technologies that were widely adopted during the pandemic? Schools are able to monitor children’s online behavior, but this comes with a tradeoff in privacy. How are schools adapting to this? What are the effects on privacy, safety, and well-being?

RESEARCH APPROACHES

The Task Force identified a wide range of research approaches and methodologies that are beneficial in this domain, such as:

Including a broad spectrum of online platforms and spaces.

Research should include studies of different platforms, types of content, behaviors in the digital ecosystem, and social media, as well as but not limited to group chats, gaming, and augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) technologies.

Focusing on causal and interpretivist research.

Future research should prioritize evaluating whether causal relationships exist between different types of online platform use/design and various health, safety, and privacy outcomes for youth. This should include use of qualitative research that emphasizes young people’s subjective experiences and understandings of their use of online platforms—not just quantitative analysis of more easily observable platform usage statistics. Among the key questions to consider are: What are the complex causal linkages between social media use and mental and physical health outcomes?³⁴⁷ Which interventions will improve the well-being of specific groups of youth? Which specific online behaviors and aspects of platforms (e.g., designs, features, algorithms, etc.) influence mental health outcomes, such as depression, anxiety, compulsive or problematic use, self-harm, and suicidality, or affect daily functions, such as sleep, school, or daily tasks? How is the use of social media—and the potential harm it causes—related to the beliefs, norms, and values of society broadly?

Including new methods for assessing what data are collected and with whom data are shared, including through monetization processes.

It is critical for social media platforms to provide independent researchers with access to data to assess the impact on youth health, safety, and privacy (see page 41, “Make Data Accessible for Independent Research”). For a variety of reasons, platforms do not provide what data are collected and with whom data is shared, which makes answering research questions difficult. Additionally, advancements in rapidly changing technologies, such as augmented and virtual reality, offer new avenues for engagement on digital platforms. As platforms collect new data for which the privacy implications are unclear, such as eye movements and telemetry data,^{348 349} there is a need for research cataloguing the data types³⁵⁰ that are collected and their implications for health, safety, and privacy.

Engaging youth.

Technology is fully integrated into the youth experience. Adult researchers need to understand that technology is the currency of youth and that youth understand and experience digital cultures in different ways than adults do, making youth perspective essential. It is imperative to ask what youth want to know about digital behavior, the risks and benefits of social media, and the impacts of social media and the digital ecosystem on their own development and longterm outcomes. Additionally, methodologies that are participatory, such as action research and “citizen science” involving youth, may capture specific insights into their experience with health, safety, and privacy online.³⁵¹

Next: Next Steps for Policymakers