Dr. Pamela Wisniewski presented an Emerging Leaders lightning talk at the CRA Summit 2026, titled “Safety by Design: Building the Village That Protects and Empowers Youth Online.” Drawing on more than a decade of research on adolescent online safety, Wisniewski challenged the computing research community to rethink how technology can better protect and empower young people online.
Rather than relying primarily on bans, age-gating, and reactive interventions, Wisniewski advocated for a Safety by Design approach—one that embeds protections into platforms from the outset while providing young people with the agency, skills, and support they need to participate online safely and meaningfully.
She highlighted several emerging areas where computing researchers can help translate Safety by Design into practice, including AI chatbots and companions, privacy-preserving age assurance, social media harms, grooming and sextortion, deepfakes and synthetic media, social VR/XR, youth privacy and surveillance, and technology-supported mental health and crisis response.
Wisniewski also emphasized that youth online safety is not a challenge that any single computing discipline can solve alone. Progress will require collaboration across HCI, AI, privacy and security, systems, software engineering, and data science, as well as connections with psychology, education, public health, law, and the lived experiences of young people themselves.
At the heart of her message was a call for the research community to think beyond simply protecting youth from harm and toward designing sociotechnical systems that empower young people to thrive as technology continues to evolve.
“Let’s build that village . . . together.”