In a Time of Moral Panic: Is There a Middle Ground for Adolescent Online Safety?
Keynote, recipient of the 2026 USEC Test of Time Award at the Symposium on Usable Security and Privacy (USEC) 2026, co-located with NDSS Symposium 2026, San Diego, CA
Friday, 27 February 2026
09:10-10:00
Adolescent online safety is increasingly driven by fear rather than evidence, resulting in approaches that emphasize restriction, surveillance, and bans over strategies that actually support teens’ development and well-being. Nearly a decade ago, the paper receiving this Test of Time Award showed that the mobile online safety ecosystem overwhelmingly prioritized parental control through monitoring and restriction, while providing very little support for teen self-regulation, active mediation, or resilience-building, despite strong evidence that these strategies matter. Across my broader body of research, teens consistently demonstrate that they engage in deliberate, context-aware decision-making online and use their own risk calculus to balance safety, autonomy, and social connection. At the same time, the internet operates as a double-edged sword that magnifies both benefits and risks, with youth who are already most vulnerable often experiencing the greatest and most disproportionate harms. Yet, treating teens as completely incapable of managing risk ignores both developmental science and their lived reality. Current moves toward youth social media bans and highly restrictive regulation risk cutting teens off from important sources of identity development, peer support, and help-seeking without addressing the underlying causes of harm. I argue that we need to return to evidence-based approaches, including “Safety by Design” and socio-ecological models of support that recognize adolescent agency and distribute responsibility for online safety across platforms, families, and communities because controlling teens online is not the same as keeping them safe.
Keynote Speaker: Pamela Wisniewski
Principal Research Scientist, International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) and Non-resident Fellow, AFOG Working Group, University of California, Berkeley
Dr. Pamela Wisniewski is a Principal Research Scientist at the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) and a non-resident fellow of the Algorithmic Fairness and Opacity (AFOG) Working Group within the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley.
Her work in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) lies at the intersection of Social Computing and Privacy. She is an expert in online safety for adolescents. As the Founder and Director of the Socio-Technical Interaction Research (STIR) Lab and Teenovate, she has authored over 200 peer-reviewed publications and won multiple best papers (top 1%) and best paper honorable mentions (top 5%) at ACM SIGCHI conferences. Her research program has secured $6.04 million in external funding, including the NSF CAREER Award, and has been featured in outlets such as Scientific American, CNN, ABC News, NPR, Psychology Today, and U.S. News & World Report. As an ACM Senior Member, Dr. Wisniewski also serves on the DARPA ISAT Study Group and previously served on the Computing Research Association’s CCC Council. She became the first computer scientist selected as a William T. Grant Scholar for her efforts to reduce digital inequality for youth. The importance of her work on adolescent online safety has been recognized nationally and internationally by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, Netherland’s Down to Zero Alliance on combating the online sexual exploitation of children, and the White House’s Task Force on Kids Online Health and Safety. Her efforts have helped shape research, policy, and design practices aimed at creating safer and more inclusive digital experiences for young people.