Debates in Youth Online Safety and Wellb

This course examines live debates in youth online safety and wellbeing, asking what online harm actually means when it intersects with adolescent development, how content moderation tradeoffs land differently for young users, how platform design choices shape teen experiences, and what conversational and companion AI introduce that existing frameworks are still working to address.

The field sits at a genuine moment of contestation. Researchers, clinicians, platform practitioners, and policymakers often reach different conclusions from the same evidence: on screen time, on algorithmic risk, and on the role of age-appropriate design. In this course, students will engage with the empirical literature alongside policy debates, practitioner perspectives, and the advocacy landscape, developing their own informed positions on questions the field has not yet settled.

The course will include scholarly literature on developmental science, platform policy, regulatory frameworks across the United States, European Union, and United Kingdom, as well as public discourse. By the end of the course, students should be able to evaluate competing empirical claims in the youth online safety and wellbeing space, understand how policy is made and where it breaks down, and engage credibly with practitioners in industry, government, and civil society who are working on challenges related to youth online safety and wellbeing.

A note on "youth"

Throughout this course, "youth" refers primarily to adolescents aged 13-17. Where relevant, particularly in regulatory and design contexts, the course will also engage with protections for younger children and research on young adults, where developmental science suggests the adolescent developmental window may extend beyond age 18.