Congratulations to Dr. Katie Park for presenting her Paper at WWW ’23 Companion: Companion Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2023.
Towards Automated Detection of Risky Images Shared by Youth on Social Media
Jinkyung Park, Joshua Gracie, Ashwaq Alsoubai, Gianluca Stringhini, Vivek Singh, Pamela Wisniewski
Abstract: With the growing ubiquity of the Internet and access to media-based social media platforms, the risks associated with media content sharing on social media and the need for safety measures against such risks have grown paramount. At the same time, risk is highly contextualized, especially when it comes to media content youth share privately on social media. In this work, we conducted qualitative content analyses on risky media content flagged by youth participants and research assistants of similar ages to explore contextual dimensions of youth online risks. The contextual risk dimensions were then used to inform semi- and self-supervised state-of-the-art vision transformers to automate the process of identifying risky images shared by youth. We found that vision transformers are capable of learning complex image features for use in automated risk detection and classification. The results of our study serve as a foundation for designing contextualized and youth-centered machine-learning methods for automated online risk detection.
