Teen Vigilance: Navigating Risky Social Interactions on Discord

2026-03-02

AI Summary

This study addresses the complex privacy and safety risks adolescents encounter when interacting with strangers on Discord, highlighting their lack of effective coping mechanisms. Through semi-structured interviews with 16 adolescents and subsequent thematic analysis, the research uncovers a multi-layered set of risk-mitigation strategies, including suspicious behavior assessment, use of safety tools, controlled risk-taking, and selective community participation. The work introduces the concept of “vigilance” to capture adolescents’ proactive agentic efforts in navigating online risks. This perspective advances youth-centered approaches to online safety design and underscores the importance of aligning individual vigilance with community-level governance to enhance platform safety.

Technology Category

• Natural Language Processing: Safety and Robustness
• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Multiagent Systems: Multiagent Systems under Uncertainty

Application Category

• Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurements
• Responsible Web: Mitigating online harms, including harassment, spam, and fake reviews
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Fairness, privacy, and diversity in economic environments

Abstract

Teenagers are avid users of Discord, a fast growing platform for synchronous communication where they often interact with strangers. Because Discord combines private DMs, semi-private voice channels, and public servers in one place, it creates a hybrid environment that can produce complex and underexplored safety risks for teenagers. Drawing on 16 interviews with teenage Discord users, this study examines their strategies for navigating risky social interactions in the platform. Our findings reveal that when teenagers encounter risks during social interactions, they exercise vigilance by evaluating suspicious interactions before forming friendships, using safety tools, and engaging in controlled risk-taking to safeguard their privacy and security. At the community level, they mitigate risks through selective participation in servers, a practice supported by vigilant governance structures. We discuss how vigilance enables teenagers to act during risky encounters to protect themselves, advancing understanding of teenagers' agency in risk navigation and informing teen-centered designs for safer online environments.

Problem

• teen safety
• Discord
• risky social interactions
• online risk
• digital vigilance

Innovation

• teen vigilance
• risk navigation
• Discord
• online safety
• youth agency