Two studies being presented at the 29th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW 2026) in Salt Lake City, running October 1 to 14, examine how communication breakdowns undermine efforts to protect vulnerable users of technologies including social media and AI chatbots.
One of the studies lands amid a wave of lawsuits over the effects of social media on young people. It finds that platforms have fallen short in explaining the risks of their products to children and the people responsible for them. According to Pamela Wisniewski, PhD, principal research scientist and leader of the Socio-Technical Interaction Research Group at the International Computer Science Institute, safety communications tend to be selective, vague and hard to verify.
Wisniewski frames the problem as one of accountability rather than engineering. Platforms are under intense scrutiny over their impact on children, she said, but a central question is whether families and policymakers can even understand what protections exist, who can use them, and whether any evidence shows they work. Without clearer disclosure on those three points, outside parties have little ability to judge whether a safety feature is meaningful or decorative.
The framing matters beyond children. Any group described as vulnerable online, including older adults and people with cognitive impairment who rely on family members to help manage their digital lives, depends on the same chain of information: a caregiver or policymaker has to be able to find out what a platform actually does to reduce harm. The researchers' argument is that this chain currently breaks at the communication step.