Small study suggests around half of US teens witness online harm, and around a third have been targeted

A survey of 472 US adolescents across 47 states found 44.7% had witnessed online harassment and 29.8% had experienced it directly in the past four weeks. Perhaps surprisingly, the same proportion of the teens reported being targeted for harm offline as online.

The study group, while relatively small, was reflective of the wider US adolescent population, the authors say, and the teens reported their experiences of harm on 20 different platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Discord, and Pinterest.

The researchers also found that, apart from being targeted for harm, young people were generally more likely to experience harms online than off. For violent imagery, 10.7% said they’d been exposed online, while just 1.6% were exposed offline, 13.4% had seen unwanted sexual images online, while just 2.0% had offline, and 9.7% saw content encouraging self-harm online, compared with 5.2% offline. The researchers say their findings could be used as a baseline to track online harm in young people in the future.

The findings are published in the journal JAMA Pediatrics.

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