A Social Norms Approach to Youth Social Media Design

Jul 16, 2026

Young people consistently desire authentic self-expression, reduced judgment, and greater interpersonal trust on social media, but struggle to participate in that way. This dissertation argues the barrier is normative rather than individual: youth engagement is shaped by platform norms, peer perception, and beliefs about others’ behavior more than by personal choice. A social-norms lens yields three claims about behavior constraint, norm-shaped interventions, and platform-level societal definitions that limit alternatives.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages4

Reading Time10 min

Introduction and Motivation

Theoretical Grounding

Three Claims and Design Implications

A Social Norms Approach to Youth Social Media Design JaeWon Kim The Information School, University of Washington Seattle, Washington, USA [jaewonk@uw.edu](jaewonk@uw.edu) arXiv :2607 .0 1807v 1 [ cs .HC] 2 Jul 2026 Abstract Young people consistently say they want authentic self-expression, less judgment, and more interpersonal trust on social media, yet they rarely manage to engage that way. My dissertation argues that the obstacle is normative rather than individual: how youth engage is governed less by personal choice than by platform norms, peer perception, and beliefs about how others behave. I take a social norms approach to youth social media design organized around three claims. First, platform norms constrain individual behavior, producing a pluralistic ignorance in which youth enact norms they privately reject. Second, design interventions are themselves shaped by existing norms, so whether a feature works depends on the environment around it, which means relational goals such as privacy must be treated as social norms rather than individual settings. Third, a societal norm about what “social media” is—equating it with a few mainstream platforms—confines policy and design to mitigating those platforms rather than actively envisioning supportive alternatives. Together these claims motivate my dissertation research: engaging youth directly in designing and building an evidence-based independent platform whose features consistently signal that building trusted connections is what the space is for. CCS Concepts • Human-centered computing → Collaborative and social computing. Keywords social media; youth; norms; design ACM Reference Format: JaeWon Kim. 2026. A Social Norms Approach to Youth Social Media Design. In Companion of the Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW Companion ’26), October 10–14, 2026, Salt Lake City, UT, USA. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 4 pages. [https://doi.org/10.1145/3785651.3830025](https://doi.org/10.1145/3785651.3830025) 1 Introduction and Motivation Young people are clear about what they want from social media and largely unable to get it. Across studies, adolescents and young adults say they want authentic self-expression, everyday sharing with people they trust, and connection without constant evaluation [5, 19, 20] . They can also name what gets in the way, from follower counts that invite comparison to the sense that posting anything ordinary looks like a bid for attention. What they cannot easily do This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4 .0 International License. CSCW Companion ’26, Salt Lake City, UT, USA © 2026 Copyright held by the owner/author(s) . ACM ISBN 979-8-4007-2378-0/2026/10 [https://doi.org/10.1145/3785651.3830025](https://doi.org/10.1145/3785651.3830025) is act on this knowledge, because how one engages online does not feel like a personal choice. It feels like a response to what the platform rewards, how peers might react, and how everyone else appears to be behaving [13, 18] . My dissertation takes this gap as its central problem and argues that it is normative. Youth often cannot engage as they want not because they lack motivation or awareness, but because the normative environment, shaped by platform design, discourages the behaviors they value. Changing what young people do online therefore means changing the norms that govern their behavior, not only the features they are offered. I pursue this through a social norms approach built on three claims, moving from how norms constrain individuals, to how they shape design, to how a norm about what social media is forecloses alternatives. Taken together, these point toward a platform built with youth whose design consistently communicates that trusted connection is what the space is for, and the sections below develop that argument and the research it motivates. 2 Theoretical Grounding Social norms are informal understandings about what pe

FAQs

Why does the dissertation argue that youth struggle to engage authentically on social media?

It argues the obstacle is normative rather than individual: platform norms, peer perception, and beliefs about how others behave govern engagement more than personal choice.

What does the dissertation mean by pluralistic ignorance in this context?

Youth may enact platform norms they privately reject, because platform and peer cues imply that those norms are socially expected even when individuals disagree.

How are design interventions evaluated under the social norms approach?

The effectiveness of a feature depends on the surrounding normative environment, so goals like privacy must be treated as social norms rather than only individual settings.

Jul 16, 2026

Upload by Olivia Brown