Do Social Media Child Safety and Content Moderation Features Work? with Laura Edelson, PhD

Most social media platforms provide child safety and content moderation features to help protect young users from harmful content and experiences. Do they work? Will changes required by lawsuits help? On this episode of Screen Deep, host Kris Perry discusses recent research into these questions with Dr. Laura Edelson, Assistant Professor at Northeastern University’s Khoury College of Computer Science and Co-Director of Cybersecurity for Democracy. Dr. Edelson highlights the need for greater transparency and data access so that researchers can better identify potential harms of social media, and describes her research findings on algorithmic feeds as well as the efficacy of youth safety features and content moderation. In the absence of platform features that truly work to protect children, Dr. Edelson provides tips for parents on navigating social media use by their children.

In this episode, you will learn:

• What research by Dr. Edelson shows about the failure rate and design of existing child safety features on leading social media platforms
• Why it’s important that children’s accounts on social media use their real age – even if teen account protections are not fully effective
• Why current content moderation filters on social media platforms fail to block harmful posts before young users see them
• Why some of the “fixes” required for Meta as part of August 2026 lawsuit settlements may not be effective in reducing harm
• Why social media platform transparency and independent research is needed to understand how social media causes harm to some youth but not others

For more resources and research on this topic visit the Learn and Explore section of the Children and Screens website (https://www.childrenandscreens.org)

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Music: 'Life in Silico' by Scott Buckley - released under CC-BY 4.0. www.scottbuckley.com.au