Social Media Intervention
Young autistic adults face both unique benefits and high risks on social media. Our lab works to improve social media literacy and empower neurodiverse users to navigate platforms more safely and confidently.
Problem
Many young Autistic adults experience both unique benefits and disproportionately high risks when using social media, including challenges related to misunderstanding social cues, literal interpretation, and online safety. To support digital inclusion and reduce harm, our lab is working to improve social media literacy and empower neurodiverse users to navigate these platforms more safely and confidently.
Current Work
We developed and piloted a Social Media Literacy course tailored to neurodiverse users, especially Autistic young adults. The course covers social media norms, platform-specific practices (Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn, etc.), and safe online behaviors. It includes interactive activities, fake-profile detection, pre/post assessments, and is designed to be taught by instructors in the field. We are currently expanding to new field sites and developing training for instructors to teach the course independently.
Publications
- Xinru Page, Andrew Capener, Spring Cullen, Tao Wang, Monica Garfield, Pamela J. Wisniewski. (2022). "Perceiving Affordances Differently: The Unintended Consequences When Young Autistic Adults Engage with Social Media." In Proceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1-21.
- Spring Cullen, Elizabeth Johnson, Pamela J. Wisniewski, Xinru Page. (2024) "Towards Digital Independence: Identifying the Tensions between Autistic Young Adults and Their Support Network When Mediating Social Media." In Proceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1-30.