Online Racism and Youth

00:00:12 – Introductions by Executive Director of Children and Screens Kris Perry.

00:01:39 – Moderator Dr. Riana Elyse Anderson on racial socialization and its relation to online racism.

00:11:14 – Dr. Nia Heard-Garris and Dr. Alyssa Cohen on vicarious racism and children’s health.

00:26:37 – Dr. Henry Willis on the impact of online racism on Black youth, and the protective role of racial identity.

00:40:43 – Moderator Follow-Up: What are your thoughts on how the current climate affects subtle and overt incidences of racism online?

00:43:56 – Dr. Tiera Tanksley on how algorithmic systems amplify racist content online and what youth can do to fight back.

00:55:13 – Moderator Follow-Up: What are some ways that algorithms might be protective?

00:57:55 – The panel addresses questions from the audience.

00:58:33 – Q&A: How can parents and caregivers support young people of color online?

01:03:07 – Q&A: How do caregivers/educators/clinicians often respond to strategies aimed at helping young people of color online?

01:10:29 – Q&A: How can young people of color feel empowered online?

01:20:14 – Q&A: How can young people that are not of color challenge racism online?

01:23:40 – Panelists share final thoughts.

01:24:58 – Wrap-up with Children and Screens’ Executive Director Kris Perry.

[Kris Perry]:  Hello and welcome. I’m Kris Perry, executive director of Children and Screens. Thank you for being here today for today’s Ask The Experts webinar, “Online Racism and Youth.”  In today’s session, we’ll explore how racism and discrimination show up in young people’s digital lives. From direct interactions on social media to the less visible ways, feeds and recommendations can reflect and reinforce racial bias. We’ll ask how are youth encountering racism directly and vicariously, what are the mental and physical health impacts, and how can parents, caregivers, and educators respond. Our panel will provide concrete strategies to help families and schools foster healthier digital spaces, strengthen media literacy around algorithms and feeds, and empower young people to navigate and challenge online racism. Now let’s get started. I’d like to introduce you to today’s moderator, Riana Elyse Anderson. Dr. Anderson is a psychologist and associate professor at Columbia University. Riana was born in, raised for, and returned to Detroit, and has been trained in clinical and community psychology at the University of Virginia, Yale University School of Medicine, and the University of Pennsylvania. Riana studies how racial discrimination impacts the mental health of Black adolescents and their families, and develops hands-on therapeutic programs with community partners. Riana shares her knowledge and practice through media, writing, and talks. Welcome, Riana.

[Dr. Riana Elyse Anderson]: Thank you so much, Kris and hello everyone. It’s such a pleasure to be with you today for this important topic. Let’s get started on what we’re going to be talking about today.  So the title is a beautiful one–racism and youth…online racism and youth. And there might be a few things that we need to unpack before getting into the larger picture. So the first thing is, you might hear some folks today talking about this concept of racial socialization, and I just wanted to give you a quick primer on what that is. This idea of socialization, generally, you hear us all the time telling young people– where to look when they’re crossing the street, so make sure they’re looking left and right, not to touch a hot iron–these are things that we’re socializing our children in. What are the norms, the behaviors, the beliefs of the society that we’re around? How do we keep our young people safe? That’s really the question that we ask when we’re socializing. Or how do we help them to advance in what they’re doing? Now socialization comes with a host of terms in front of it. So you might have academic socialization–that might be getting your young person ready to enter into kindergarten. And they don’t know what it’s like to go in a classroom with 20 or 30 other people. They don’t know what it’s like to have a schedule with a recess or a break. So maybe you talk to your child before they go to school to socialize them. Or maybe you help them with homework when they come home to help socialize them around the norms and behaviors of getting ready to learn every day. There might be gender socialization–that might come in the way that people buy certain colors for young children, or give them certain toys. We’re trying to teach young people, either as direct, socializers–so that might be the parent or the family, or greater society, the media, etc. – that might be us trying to socialize children into the norms, beliefs, and behaviors of our greater society. So when it comes to racial socialization, it’s a mouthful. But racial socialization is exactly what we’ve just been describing. How do we get our children used to the world around them? What are the norms, beliefs, and behaviors of race in particular, in our society? So for children of color, that often means that parents, families and again, greater organizations like the media, might be trying to teach our young people a thing or two of what it means to be a child of color growing up in the society around them. So racial socialization, again, what we’re told, what we do–so maybe we go to movies together, to learn about certain things, maybe we read books,  and increasingly, maybe we’re online–learning about the ways that being of a certain culture, of a certain community, may play out in today’s society. So that’s a quick primer on racial socialization. Now, you might be asking, why on earth would we need to do something like this? It’s 2025. We don’t actually need to talk about race and racism with our young people. That’s where you’re wrong, my friend. So racial socialization has been found decade over decade to be what we call a “protective factor” for young people. So I love to just draw this diagram. If you’re a dork like me, you might appreciate this visual. But you’ve got something that is an arrow to something else– you’ve got a predictor and you’ve got an outcome. So in this case, racism or racial discrimination–those are the ways that we treat people based on their race, or the ways that systems treat people based on race–that predicts very strongly negative psychological outcomes for young people, consistently. And not just psychological. We’ve got a host of folks that are on this call that will also demonstrate the physiological, the physical, the, etc. this goes on… the educational. Any outcome that you can think of, there’s a negative relationship between this predictor and that outcome, such that the more you’ve got one increase in maybe behaviors are actions that are racial in nature–so racial discrimination or racism–the more you’ve got of that, the worse off their psychological, physical, etc.. So, why would we need to then talk about or do things with our children that are socializing in nature? It’s protective. It’s to take that line and to kick it right in half and say, “it’s not going to have the same impact, if we’re able to prepare our young children for the world that’s around them.” If they’re knowledgeable, if they know that the things happening around them may be detrimental, may be harmful to them, then psychologically, physically, educationally, they may be more prepared for it, when it happens. So socialization, and racial socialization in particular, is a protective factor. It helps our young people to prepare, unfortunately, for the society that they’re in. Now, racism over time has been something that parents, family members, greater communities, peers, have had to contend with for their young children. So it stands to reason that contemporaneous –what’s happening right now, in the online space–would add to that. So just as a quick example, when we’re looking at literature of the 1700s, what parents had to do to protect their children from, enslavement, for example, from some of the challenging experiences that young people may have been facing, these parents are drawing on the experiences of being enslaved or being, in a society that champions that type of behaviors, and their conversations with young people are very explicit around, here’s what to do to navigate this time that we’re in–the enslavement,  this, oppression that we’re in. As it goes over time, you might see conversations that parents are describing that bring in TV or film. And so they say, “when we watch this, you saw this happen.” Maybe Eyes on the Prize or Roots. So we saw these types of things happen. And now we need to incorporate what’s happening in the world or in the greater society in these conversations. That brings us to present day. If our young people are online to the tune of ten hours a day or more, for some young people, a lot of what they might be experiencing, racially is being encountered in an online space, and that might actually be different than what we used to say with our young people, because maybe the parents don’t even have the context for what these conversations might be. So that socializing might actually even be happening online in ways that parents aren’t even familiar with. So the whole landscape of how we talk to young people might be shifting as a result of the ways that young people are now getting information. So what is it that we need to do to get us to a place where we’re not only contending with what the greater society has to say, but with what online spaces actually have to say? That’s why I’m thrilled to be with our fantastic panelists today, who have not only studied the impact of what online experiences– and just to give people, again, a sense of what that looks like, maybe five incidents a day of racial discrimination or more are being reported by young people, and not just those incidents, but the outcomes. If we see more discrimination online, we’ve got more negative psychological– and in particular depression and anxiety and trauma outcomes– for these young people. So the folks on this call not only are really central in understanding, just prevalence, and just understanding what is happening in these online spaces, but also what we can do to intervene or prevent through some of those same technologies. So how do we use apps? How do we use VR? How do we use AI? How do we use the things that might contribute, on the one hand, to increase discrimination, but now can contribute to the protection and prevention as well. So again, thrilled to jump into these fascinating topics with these amazing panelists. And I would love to go ahead and get started with the most wonderful Dr. Nia Heard-Garris. I just – I was quick – I was so excited to get you on the call! Here we are, Dr. Nia. Okay. You are a pediatrician, a physician investigator, and scholar activist at the Ann and Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago and in the Department of Pediatrics at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. Dr. Heard-Garris examines the influence of social adversities experienced in childhood, and subsequent child and adolescent health, and the factors that contribute to a child’s ability to thrive despite these experiences. Dr. Heard-Garris is also an active member in the American Academy of Pediatrics, and was the founding Chair of the Section of Minority Health, Equity, and Inclusion. She earned her Master of Business from Yale University, her Master of Science from the University of Michigan (go Blue!), and her Doctor of Medicine from Howard University College of Medicine, HU.  Hi, Dr. Heard-Garris, welcome. Oh she’s excited. There it is. And, I also want to introduce Dr. Alyssa Cohen, who’s a primary care pediatrician and health services researcher focused on improving youth health through strengths-based approaches to address adversity. Her research aims to examine primary care based assessments and interventions that improve adolescent mental health by promoting positive social media engagement and mitigating the impact of negative online experiences. Her prior work has investigated adolescents’ exposure to vicarious racism in the news and social media. Welcome, Alyssa, as well. Alright. So. Oh yes. Yes. Get on in there. 

[Dr. Nia Heard-Garris]: Thank you for having us. We’re really excited to be here today and to share the screen with you. So thanks for the invitation. So we’re going to be talking about vicarious racism online and child health. And we have had the– well I will say–I’ve had the pleasure of being able to work with Dr. Cohen through, residency, her chief year, and now her early career attendinghood. So we’re going to present this together. Let’s go to our next slide.

[Dr. Alyssa Cohen]: I’ll go ahead and introduce myself. My name is Alyssa Cohen. I’m a general pediatrician and health services researcher here at Lurie Children’s and Northwestern. Like Dr. Heard-Garris  said, I have nothing to disclose related to financial conflicts of interest. I am an ambassador for the AAP Center of Excellence on Social Media and Youth Mental Health.

[Dr. Nia Heard-Garris]: And I’m Dr. Heard-Garris. I do have some disclosures. I have NIH funding currently and previously, and hope that that will continue. I’m also a co-owner and co-founder of a racial equity consulting group, which I’m not going to be talking about today, and the co-author and I receive royalties from a text in “UpToDate” about children of incarcerated parents. Another line of research that I do is with children of incarcerated parents. And I won’t be discussing any medication. Next slide please.

[Dr. Alyssa Cohen]: So our learning objectives for today, just to go through briefly, we’re going to talk about vicarious racism and its health consequences among youth.  And then specifically how vicarious racism plays out online. And then we want to end by identifying some strategies to mitigate the harmful effects of online vicarious racism. And I’ll turn it over to Dr. Nia Heard-Garris, to start us off with our first topic.

[Dr. Nia Heard-Garris]: So how I came to vicarious racism, I’m going to tell you a really brief story. In residency is where I first understood the concept of vicarious racism, even though I didn’t have the words. So I was finishing my intern year in residency. So I’m a pediatrician. And I found out that I was pregnant with my son, and who I knew inherently would be a Black child because of how I am. I’m Black and my skin color…he would be a darker skinned individual. And it was around the same time that Trayvon Martin, who was a 17 year old child in Florida, was visiting his dad, and he was killed. He was killed in his dad’s neighborhood because he “looked suspicious.” And even though I didn’t know Trayvon, or his family, or know his community, or his mom, I was devastated. So I found out I was pregnant. I was working in Washington, D.C. as a resident, taking care of many children all across the DMV area, but really all across the world. And I was deeply sad. I was sad because I knew that I was going to have a Black boy who the world wasn’t ready for and didn’t want to help promote and support his ability to thrive. And the other reason I was sad is because I think pediatricians–I’m biased, obviously–are the kindest, most caring, advocates for children, and they weren’t having the conversations. So in our break rooms, in between seeing patients–we weren’t talking about the fact that Trayvon Martin was killed, and that he was a 17 year old minding his business, murdered. And I thought, wow, if pediatricians aren’t having this conversation, if they’re not aware of what’s happening in the world, or if they’re aware and not doing anything about it, that’s a problem. And so that’s where I first came to the concept of really trying to understand–why did an event somewhere, across the country, with people I didn’t know, affect me so deeply? And so that’s how I came to vicarious racism. And I used to have a hard time getting folks to really understand what vicarious racism was. But given the last few years, it’s been a little easier to explain how racist activity, racist events, can impact you even if you are not in close proximity with the person that is experiencing the racism. So I think people more easily understand this concept, and it’s become more mainstream in the American consciousness. Next slide please. So vicarious racism traditionally had referred to experiencing racial discrimination indirectly–so through close contact such as family members or peers. So the example I typically use will be like, when I was growing up, and my dad, also a Black man, would be driving and would be pulled over by the cops, I would ask him, like, “why were you pulled over?” And he’s like, you know, “driving while Black.” And so that sort of racism, very close– like, you know, obviously your peers or your, parents–that’s a direct contact. But I strongly believe, however, that this definition wasn’t inclusive enough to capture my own experience, and residency, and experiences that I knew many other individuals were experiencing when watching and hearing about events like the murder of Trayvon, like the murders of Breonna Taylor and Ahmad Arbery. Right. Like George Floyd. Like those events, even if you did not know the person, or were in the same community, or they weren’t a parent or a peer, affected many, many, many people deeply. Thus because of that experience, in some of my earlier work, I shifted the definition of vicarious racism to try to expand it, to fully capture the breadth of the experiences that I know that other people were experiencing. So here, vicarious racism is defined as: the second hand exposure to the racial discrimination and or prejudice directed at another individual. So exposure to vicarious racism is irrespective of the race of the indirect target. And in order for that exposure to racism to be considered vicarious, the unintended victim must be cognizant that racism essentially is occurring. And so, that can be experienced by those who are not directly involved with the event, but those who identify with the victims of racism generally, because of the basis of race, age, gender–those also could be factors, but it doesn’t have to be. Next slide. So I’m going to get a little bit nerdy. So I’m a pediatrician but I’m also a scientist. So I do a lot of work in this space. And one of our earlier – one of my earlier works was again trying to capture what is this thing called vicarious racism, and is it important? I was trying to make a case, again, that pediatricians, health care providers, should care about things that are happening in children’s lives, even if we can’t fully understand and ask about it in checkups. We should understand what it is. So to learn more about vicarious racism, I conducted a systematic literature review which was published in 2018, and we reviewed over 1400 articles, or nearly 1400 articles. We drew from seven different databases– so all different collections of databases–with 30 studies ultimately meeting that inclusion. So we looked at 30 studies very closely. And we researched the methodology, the conceptualization, the measurement of vicarious racism, and sample characteristics, and significant associations with child health, and mediators and moderators of those associations. So we found that 50%, almost 50%, of the studies showed that vicarious racism was associated with an important domain of child health. And those domains, specifically for child health, physical health was one of the important domains. We found that vicarious racism was associated with having a higher BMI–so that’s  body mass index–those children were more likely to have child–just general illnesses, and more likely to have lower weights, for their age. And then, those that were exposed to vicarious racism had a higher frequency or visited the doctor more often. For their social emotional health, they had more externalizing behaviors, so those are behaviors directed at others–yelling, impulsivity, rule breaking. And more internalizing behavior, so those are behaviors directed at oneself–so withdrawing, isolation, self-harm. And then more socioemotional difficulties–lower self-esteem and less positive behavior. And from a mental health standpoint, they were more likely to have higher depressive symptoms, more anxiety, more substance use, lower well-being, and difficulty with cognitive task. So all in all, we found that vicarious racism was not good for child health. Next slide. Next slide. 

[Dr. Alyssa Cohen]: Now, I’m gonna, go ahead and talk about some of the ways of vicarious racism, which we have shown is really detrimental to child health, can play out in online spaces. So, in some of the work that Dr. Heard-Garris and I have done, we focus specifically on how the news is portrayed through online media. But I think that some of our other presenters today are going to talk about the myriad ways that racism can be transmitted in online spaces. So specifically around the news media, that can be an exposure to vicarious racism, with examples like viral videos of racialized violence. I don’t think you have to look too hard to find those online, today and throughout the last decade or so. Hate speech is really prominent in online spaces. And then even news stories themselves can transmit information about racially charged events or policies. And the thing that’s unique about the online space in these exposures, is that social media affords these new interaction capabilities that don’t exist in traditional media. So there’s interactive components such as comment sections and reactions that can actually perpetuate the trauma that is happening through the racist event or whatever is being portrayed. And these things are really ubiquitous. Thinking about apps like TikTok, disturbing content may lack any warning to the consumer that it’s about to show up. You just scroll and the video pops up and starts playing. So these exposures are really hard to avoid. In the introduction, Dr. Anderson mentioned this figure of five incidents a day of online violence. And, I think that may come from the work of Dr. Brendesha Tynes, who has a recent study looking at just the different ways that Black adolescents in particular are exposed to race related online events. And focusing specifically on that vicarious racism piece, Black adolescents report an average of 1.5 exposures just to the vicarious racism. So what she terms “race-related traumatic events” online per day. So this is happening constantly. It is really unavoidable. Dr. Heard-Garris and I had the chance to talk to youth specifically about how they experienced this, and I really want to highlight their voices in this because they had a lot to say. This is a study we did back in 2018, but you’ll find that a lot of the principles have turned out to be quite prescient in today’s moment. So, we held focus groups with teenagers, 13 to 19 year olds, and talked to them just about how they experience vicarious racism online. Some of the themes that I want to highlight–we’re pediatricians, we’re interested in health–so negative mood was one of the big things that popped out to us–adolescents telling us that they had feelings of sadness. One of our participants said, “Some of my white counterparts will be like, ‘oh, this thing happened. How do you feel about it?’ And I’m like, I created the term melanincholy,” which we thought was, really powerful. Helplessness and, kind of a feeling that racism is just an immutable part of the world, was another big theme that came out of our discussions. And then outside of the health domain, there were already concerns about fake news among the youth that we talked to. This is now seven years ago, and these have only become more prominent. Overall, there is a sense of saturation that these exposures were just really everywhere and unavoidable. So with that, we were interested to hear what we could do to help mitigate the harmful effects of online vicarious racism.

[Dr. Nia Heard-Garris]: So we have a couple of different domains of strategies. So for individual strategies, we suggest establishing boundaries and limits in youth and in your own content engagement, and disengage and report when harm is suspected or experienced. So try to put the phone down or close the computer, and step away. We encourage that youth talk with trusted adults or peers that can help them process anything that they’re seeing, or that they’ve experienced. And particularly to seek out positive content–follow people, and repost, and share content that’s positive. And then engage with online activism or solidarity within that work. So we really promote youth to engage in things that are not only positive, but actually will disrupt those experiences of vicarious racism. So what teens have been telling us, about coping with vicarious racism online,  one said, “We can use those negative emotions for good. We can be more passionate and change our actions to spread loving awareness for these kinds of things.” The second one said, “A lot of people think that teenagers are not socially aware, but I think the friends that I keep around me, once we start talking about something, it goes on and on.” Next slide. 

[Dr. Alyssa Cohen]: So in terms of community strategies, things that we can all employ, regardless of kind of what your platform is, it’s important to amplify marginalized voices and promote counter narratives, so that youth are getting a balanced perspective when they’re online. You can join communities that support social justice and racial justice, and practice anti-racist digital citizenship by fact checking before sharing things online. And then finally, I think we’re going to get into this more as a group. But at the policy and technology level, there really is an imperative on the technology companies to design with safety and health in mind. We need to support children and adolescents in these spaces by developing technologies that can proactively identify and mitigate these harms. So, we can all use our voices to advocate for laws that hold these platforms accountable. With that, we want to say thank you.

[Dr. Riana Elyse Anderson]:  Yes. Yes. Excellent work colleagues, and we’ll definitely get into some, Q&A in a bit. We want to make sure that we’re ensuring that we’re on time. So I’ll just note that I know you have, as you said, from your intro to some really amazing ways to address those lines that you were showing in your, your model very specifically. So we definitely want to talk interventions with you, specifically with families and communities, when we come back to you. So thank you so much. We’ll see you in a bit. Alrighty. I am very excited now to move on to Dr. Henry A. Willis, who is an Assistant Professor in Clinical Psychology at the University of Maryland, College Park. Dr. Willis received his B.S. in psychology from Howard University, another HU, alright, his M.A. in clinical psychology from Columbia University, and his Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He directs the Cultural Resilience, Equity and Technology Lab, which explores the relationship between online and offline racial discrimination and mental health outcomes, and how protective factors impact psychopathology among African Americans and utilizes technology to increase access to mental health  treatments. Dr. Willis also assists in clinical training at the Hope Center, one of my community partners here in New York, a free mental health clinic down the street in Harlem. So, Dr.  Willis, so good to have you.

[Dr. Henry A. Willis]: Thank you. I am really excited to be here today also. Hello, Dr. Heard-Garris. It’s nice to see a fellow bison. Happy homecoming week. So, I’m really excited today to talk to you all a little bit more about online racial discrimination in particular, and how it impacts mental health for Black youth and for youth of color. I don’t have any conflicts of interest to disclose. So I want to start by first talking about what we know about the digital world and race during adolescence. First, we do know that Black and Hispanic teens are more likely to say that they’re online constantly, as compared to white and Asian teens. We also know that Black and Hispanic teens are more likely to use some of the most popular social media platforms, such as TikTok or X, than their white peers. And so all of this to say, the digital world has become a staple in adolescent development, especially for youth of color. We also know that during adolescence, it’s very important that youth are able to develop healthy racial identity beliefs during this time, because having these healthy beliefs typically predict better psychological, and social development, and adjustment over time for youth of color. One of the ways that this happens is through racial socialization, like Dr. Anderson talked about earlier. And what we also know is that a lot of these race related messages are happening in online spaces. Not only are these messages happening in online spaces, youth of color are also exploring that race in these online spaces. And this might lead to some positive experiences for youth. But also, we know that Black youth in particular are often at an increased risk of experiencing racial discrimination in these arenas, especially on social media. So for the next couple of slides, I just want to give a brief trigger warning because I will be showing some content that has explicit language. If you’re here this afternoon or this morning, if you’re on the West Coast, it should come as no surprise, in that there’s been a rise in the kind of racist content that we see online, especially on social media. Every time I’m about to do a talk like this, I do my own little experiment, and I monitor every time I am actually exposed to online racial discrimination in the weeks or months leading up to these kind of talks. And, unfortunately, it never really takes long to find examples on my own social media feed. So I spend less time online these days. And if I can see these many tweets and these types of tweets just in my casual scrolling, you can imagine the amount of racist content that our youth are seeing on a daily basis, especially because they’re online almost constantly. As the previous presenters talked about, in addition to just seeing online racial discrimination or being a target of discrimination online, Black youth have also had to navigate exposure to what we call traumatic race-related events online, such as seeing viral videos of shootings of unarmed Black men, or viral images and news stories of Latine kids in cages. These type of contents and experiences, or what we call online racial discrimination, which we define as the denigration or exclusion of a person based on their race or their ethnicity, using a variety of digital means. And this can happen in several contexts, such as just on the internet broadly, in chat rooms, YouTube, social networking sites, and video games. But a lot of the experiences that I explore are experiences of online racial discrimination on social networking sites. We know that these experiences can be what we call individual online racial discrimination experiences, and this refers to being directly targeted online because of your race or ethnicity. These experiences can all also happen vicariously. So in addition to the news stories and other things our presenters talked about, other examples include seeing racist means or images about your racial ethnic group online. We also know through research that exposure to these traumatic events online have increased over the past few years, and they pose another risk to the mental health of Black youth and youth of color. And we can probably all remember the repeated exposure to the death of George Floyd in the summer of 2020. In fact, there have been studies to show that since 2020, Black youths in particular, exposure to online racial discrimination has increased, and we’re starting to see data that Black youth might also experience more online racial discrimination than Black adults. So in this study, they found that 1 in 2 Black youth reported at least one instance of online racial discrimination during 2020, whereas only about 40% of Black adults did. So, imagine that if I saw those many tweets in a matter of weeks, youth are experiencing significantly more of this racist content online. So how does this connect to psychological and social adjustment among Black youth? So we are seeing, through work that me and my colleagues have done, that experiences of online racism and online racial discrimination in particular, are associated with increased anxiety symptoms, depressive symptoms, post-traumatic stress symptoms, and even increases in alcohol use and suicidal ideation. We also know that Black youth and youth of color don’t live in a silo. They aren’t just online, for example, and studies have shown that Black youth have had to navigate both online and offline forms of racial discrimination at the same time. And this dual kind of burden also has a very big negative impact on their mental health. So in a study that I think a couple of us have started to…have cited this afternoon, they found that in just a matter of two weeks, Black youth reported experiencing over 5000 instances of both online and offline experiences of racial discrimination, with an average of over five racist encounters a day. It’s important to note that most of these encounters happen online. And more importantly, if you are exposed to these encounters, you had worse mental health that day that you saw the content, but also you had worse mental health the next day because of that content. In another study that I’m leading, we’ve actually found longitudinally that even being directly targeted because of your race online could lead to increased trauma symptoms even a year later, after being attacked online. Fortunately, we know that not all Black youth who experience online racism and online racial discrimination are affected by it in the same way. So I’m going to go back to some… to the term that Dr. Anderson mentioned earlier, which is the protective nature of some of these processes, such as the protective nature of racial identity beliefs. We know that when Black youth and youth of color have very strong and positive beliefs about what it means to be a member of their group, and when they feel proud to be a member of their group, it can actually buffer some of the stress that might come along with online racial discrimination. But it can also be promotive, in that just having these positive racial identity beliefs are enough to predict better outcomes among Black youth, even in a context of distress and all the other things that they have to navigate on a daily basis. For example, when these beliefs are very central to how youth see themselves and define themselves, it helps protect them against discrimination, and it also predicts better psychological well-being. We also know when youth feel very proud about being a member of their race, they typically have better psychological outcomes. In fact, in a recent study that I published, we found that having these high levels of private regard or positive feelings about being a member of your race actually buffered some of the stress caused by online racial discrimination on post-traumatic stress symptoms. Similarly, in another study, about 800 youth from across the country, 800 youth of color, we found that online racial discrimination did lead to higher levels of what we call racism-based traumatic stress symptoms. But more importantly, we found that when youth had high levels of being committed to their identity, feeling affirmed and feeling good about their racial ethnic identity, and feeling like they belonged to the… a sense of belonging to their racial group, It actually protected against some of the negative impact of online racial discrimination. For instance, we saw that even when you had just low levels of these beliefs, it was enough to fully protect them against the stress caused by vicarious online racial discrimination. More importantly, when youth had high levels of these beliefs, they actually reported lower racial trauma symptoms. This means that these beliefs, not only protected against online racial discrimination, even when they experienced a lot, they still had lower racial trauma symptoms than their peers, with only low and average levels of these beliefs. So just a couple of high level takeaways that I want to share is that the study- the research shows that various forms of online racism and racial discrimination are associated with a lot of different negative mental health outcomes, and can lead to race-based traumatic stress for Black youth and other youth of color. But it’s also important to note that social media isn’t all bad and that there can be positive experiences, especially when you have positive racial-ethnic identity beliefs. And in some current work that I’m doing with Black teens, they are talking about how they might find spaces online and use social media in ways to support their own mental health and identity development. So before I share a couple tips, I just want to really just hone in on why studying this relationship between online racial discrimination and mental health for Black youth is important, because there are real consequences that we see in our society every day. And I just want to provide another trigger warning as we’re going to be talking about self-harm. So you may have heard the unfortunate news earlier this year that a young Black high school student fatally shot another student before taking their own life…taking their own life. And it was found that these acts were motivated by anti-Black sentiments that they had been exposed to on the internet and on social media, as well as internalized racist attitudes that he had towards himself and other Black people. For instance, he stated that he was miserable and that feeling subhuman made him want to kill himself. He felt like he didn’t belong among his friends, and he felt like he was being humiliated. And so he used social media and this racist content online to just, disassociate, and this had a lot of negative impacts long term. So this means that we have to both try to find ways to reduce exposure to online hate speech, and in the meantime, we have to help our youth cope with these experiences and feel better about their racial identity while they are navigating this new online reality that they have to face. So what can we do when online racial discrimination happens? So for youth, it’s important for parents and other adults and caregivers in their lives to receive and validate their experiences and reinforce that you’re happy that they are sharing these kind of experiences with you. It’s important that youth find ways to reduce re-exposure to this content, whether that’s closing the app, not rewatching certain videos, or muting certain accounts for about 24 hours or longer. They can decide to record and report some of these instances, so it’s less likely that other youth are exposed to either certain content or certain people that might be engaging in discrimination online. And we also have to teach our youth to check in with themselves, and we can teach them different breathing techniques and other ways to just kind of check in on their own physical and mental health in the midst of discrimination. Finally, for parents and practitioners, and this includes clinicians or educators, it might be useful for families to think about having a weekly ten minute kind of check in where you look at each other’s feed and look at settings, and help you try to remove toxic followers, or even add affirming creators and followers that might help them feel a sense of belonging online. This might look like creating a shared family media plan. And for clinicians and educators, it also highlights the importance of trying to screen for these experiences when we’re working with youth. And this might also include creating a digital safety plan. It’s also important to be on the lookout for some of the negative mental health symptoms that can come about when youth are exposed to these type of experiences and to direct them towards just higher levels of intervention if needed. So I want to thank you all for your time. This is my contact information. I’m looking forward to the Q&A.

[Dr. Riana Elyse Anderson]: Thank you so much, Dr. Willis. And you really got two concrete tips that I love. That’s definitely how we have to roll, especially in today’s quick economy here. So one thing that I would love you to think through briefly for us is, what do you think the current political landscape is doing? And I’m thinking a lot about that young person that you talked about, what messages he’s receiving and how he acted behaviorally in response to that. So I’m just wondering, what do you think is happening with those subtle and now very clearly overt and concrete expressions of racist thinking, behaviors, and laws?

[Dr. Henry A. Willis]: It’s a very, very, very important topic. And like I said, I have a current study where we’re doing focus group work with Black teens to explore the experiences on social media and online racial discrimination. And one, one of the subtle things that you all might have known or seen happen is that there have been a lot of roll backs, and in terms of how content is moderated on platforms such as X, for example, and a lot of that has been politically motivated for a lot of various reasons we don’t have to get into. But, youth know that and they’ve recognized that. I’ve actually had Black teens say that, you know, they’ve seen how toxic X or Twitter has become, and that they’ve seen more online racist content because of the political kind of changes that have happened and how content is moderated. But they’ve also seen a rise in some of that overt content. So I actually had teens talk about how they saw these conversations online about our–or when our current president was talking about not making Juneteenth a holiday anymore. And these teens saw that, and they talked about how upsetting it was to not only hear that message from the president, but also to see other people online agreeing and really kind of disrespecting and devaluing the importance of that holiday. And it made them feel paranoid, and it made them feel isolated and angry. So I do think we have to really pay close attention to how the political space is not only increasing the occurrence of online racial discrimination, but how those laws and policies are shaping these online experiences in a negative way for our youth.

[Dr. Riana Elyse Anderson]: Absolutely. Really appreciate that. And just as a person who follows your recommendations, I had to completely get off of X because it was such a negative space after some deregulation. And I can’t imagine, as you showed on screen, what it’s like now. So really, keeping our young people in mind when we’re, when we’re doing this, but also ourselves as a protected mechanism. So thank you for those fantastic tips. I’ll see you in just a bit for our Q&A. Alright, folks, we are with our final panelist who is just phenomenal. I’m so excited to introduce Dr. Tiera Tanksley, who is a Senior Research Scientist and a 2025 Spencer Foundation Fellow in AI and Education, whose work examines the socio-emotional, mental health, and academic impacts of digital and artificially intelligent technologies on Black youth. Her work simultaneously recognizes Black youth as digital activists and civic agitators, and examines the complex ways they subvert, resist, and rewrite racially biased technologies to produce more just and joyous digital experiences for communities of color around the globe. What a joy to have you, Dr. Tiera Tanksley, welcome. 

[Dr. Tiera Tanksley]: Thank you so much for having me. So I don’t have any slides today, y’all. But I’m just going to kind of build off what my colleagues have been talking about and really expose some of the, sociotechnical underpinnings, right? So the algorithms and the machine learning models that are creating experiences that folks have shared today. So I want to start with this idea about racially traumatizing content online. One of my first research studies was my dissertation study, and I was looking at what types of content Black youth were experiencing online during #BlackLivesMatter. And I was only trying to explore the positives. And, you know, that was really difficult, because there was a lot of traumatizing content online. And so in that study, I started to actually look at what algorithms are actually causing young people to see these images. And so what I want to highlight is that algorithms are actually primed to hypercirculate racially traumatizing content, right? In general, they’re primed to show content that is stressful because the engineers at a lot of these companies like Meta actually have found that negative emotions are actually – they encourage young people to stay online, right? You’ve heard of rage baiting. And so we see that when content is stressful, or your moved to argument, or to argue online, you spend more time on these apps. And so that is called the engagement economy – they’re actually designing these systems to create, like obsessive kind of, participation. And so, racially traumatizing content is actually designed in the infrastructures to go viral, right? So there’s like some myths about, maybe Black youth are seeing this content because they’re searching it out more. It’s actually not true at all. Most Black youth are not actively searching for content about, you know, folks being killed, school shooters, right? Racism, everyday racism, you know, on the streets–they’re not doing that. The algorithms are actually developing user bios, essentially, on young people and then tailoring the content to them. And so I just want to give you some like statistics. So as an example, Google’s report around like 2020, they essentially said that the number one searched term in the history of Google across the world, right, was related to Black Lives Matter. And I thought that was really interesting because I was like, “Oh, wow. Okay, so what are people looking up when they’re looking at Black Lives Matter content,” right? Are they looking at GoFundMes? Are they looking up, you know, resources? And when I disaggregated the data, I found that no matter what type of media folks were searching, they were constantly looking for Black death and dying, right? So they were looking for, images of George Floyd, Sandra Bland, Eric Garner, right? Videos of autopsies, and so it was really concerning. No, again, the top five searches were for police brutality videos. And I found that it wasn’t actually Black youth that were doing that, right, it was non-Black folks. And I traced this history back to, you know, racism has always been something that is commodifiable, it’s something that has been fetished. If we look back historically, you know, at racial violence that was happening during slavery and also in reconstruction, right. Those lynchings, and other forms of violence, they were ticketed events, right? Like these were things that people paid for to see. We see that play out also in other forms of media before we had social media, right? Movies that actually showcase Black death and dying, actually make more money, and they can correlate that to the length of the scene. So if you have a movie who’s seen about a Black person dying is longer, we see that those movies make more money, which is also why, you know, this is an aside, but, you know, Tarantino movies make so much, right? So there has always been this direct correlation monetarily between, Black death and profit. And we’ve seen that become algorithmically updated in our systems. And so the reason I share that Google fact is because my study found that Black youth were reporting these images for sensitive content, for disturbing content, for violating safety precautions, you know, that all of these apps have about making the community safe, but these videos weren’t being taken down, right? And that’s because they are making a lot of money for these companies, right? The longer people engage, the more clicks that you have, the more views that you have, the more money that you make, right? So there is an incentive to keep this content online. And keep in mind that when we’re clicking on these, you know, pieces of content online, they are making money individually by the click, right? So a single click on something like this can range from like $0.05 all the way up to $6.00. And one of my colleagues mentioned George Floyd, right? We know that his video was a nine minute video and it has been viewed over 2.4 billion times. And that was a statistic that I pulled a couple years ago,so that number has gone up. And so, if you think about every single one of those views being potentially up to $6.00, you understand that Black death and dying becomes this multibillion dollar industry, right? So there’s a lot of incentive. We also see that in the content moderation protocols, right? You could say, “well, this, maybe this is all speculation,” but actually Meta’s content moderation protocols were leaked, as they’ve been now three different times, but during the time of my study, they actually had an image that showed they were training their content moderators to know which type of content to take down–what’s considered hate speech, what’s not–and the manual actually had a picture of Black children and a picture of white men. And the question was, “which one of these populations do we protect?” And it actually showed the correct answer was white men, right? And so from that, we kind of understand that racism becomes encoded into our algorithms, right? And so when Black youth are reporting that they’re seeing all of this content being hypercirculated, but that their content about, you know, Black Lives Matter, mental health, racial health, right? Racial wellness, those things are being taken down. They’re being shadow banned. They’re being demonetized – that’s actually built into these systems, right? So, Black youth are navigating this, like, dizzying matrix of algorithms meant to “protect” against hate speech that are actually protecting anti-Blackness, right? And white supremacy. And so, it’s important to prepare our young people to understand how these algorithms work. Another example I give is – Dr. Willis, you actually just mentioned this – Twitter, right? When they took their content moderation, when they scaled their content moderation back, we saw the N-word jump 500%, right? Immediately. And so, these content moderation systems play a very important role in the type of images, the type of content that is allowed, but also what young people see, because of these, like echo chambers, right? You’ve heard about, like, tailored content– your “for you” page, right? Our young people often have curated timelines where they’re seeing content that they are most likely to engage with. And, companies track that in a variety of ways–they’re looking at what you click on, they’re looking at what content you like, what content you share, repost. They’re also looking, they’re tracking cookies from other websites, right? So you – they have these really robust user profiles about the things that will get you interested, the things that will get you riled up, right? And so we’re seeing that our Black youth in particular are being fed, and recommended distressing content on purpose, right? And this goes for a variety of demographics, so it’s not just Black youth, right?  That’s what my research focuses on. But there have been so many studies about different groups in particular who are targeted. I’m going to give two other examples that I think are relevant. So in a recent, whistleblower testimony about Meta’s technologies, the whistleblower actually – who worked in higher up, in Meta – actually talked about how their protocols are designed to find insecurities. And so one metric, for example, is when a user who is identified as a young girl, posts a selfie, if she deletes it really quickly, right?–that is an indicator that she’s perhaps feeling self-conscious, she’s perhaps feeling insecure–and so what they then do is target her with content around beauty, around being skinny, advertisements for Ozempic, etc., right? Disordered eating content. And so there is an actual correlation, right, between the types of content you see and what the… what types of insecurities, weaknesses, fears, etc. young people are exposing online, and that this is actually designed algorithmically. The other example is around white boys, right? White boys are actually targeted with content called “red pilling.” And so we see that this is actually one of the reasons why there’s a growing divide, a growing gender divide, right, around political stances is because our young boys are actually being targeted with content around guns, and around anti-Black racism, around sexism, etc. So, all of that being said, I developed a program called Race Abolition and Artificial Intelligence that is designed to increase young people’s understanding of these systems, right, where we actually explore the algorithms, the machine learning systems, the content moderation systems, to understand why we’re seeing the content that we’re seeing and develop strategies, right, to resist them. I also want to prepare young people to raise the consciousness of their peers, to have the capacity to push back, right, like, in a political sense – know who you’re voting for, right? Those people have stances on social media, they have partnerships with technology firms. And so I’m just really making sure that they have all of the skills they need in order to have, a positive experience online, not just with social media, but also the technologies that are emerging in other spaces – VR, right, chat bots, etc. But yeah, I’ll stop there.

[Dr. Riana Elyse Anderson]: Thank you so much, Dr. Tanksley. And one of the things that you said, it just reminds me, again, of the importance of connecting dots here. So you talked about the proliferation of, views for certain content and trying to find certain things. If we go back to the 1920s with the postcards of lynching, if we go back even further with drawings of caricatures – this has always been a part of our zeitgeist, it just changes and manifests over time, which is  why it’s crucial to, not only have scholars of contemporary knowledge, but to be able to say, “No, no, like, don’t get it twisted, this isn’t a new form–it just shifts right with the current times.” And that’s why I’m really grateful for the work you and your team are doing. Very briefly, Dr. Tanksley, you talked about some of the ways that industry or organizations, create or amplify bias within their algorithm. What are we seeing on the protective side? What are some folks doing to mitigate that? 

[Dr. Tiera Tanskley]: So I think there’s a lot of different things, I’m going to try to be, really quick, brief. In addition to, like, activism against, or in support of regulation, right? That’s a really big area. We’re also seeing community activism, community conscious raising, right? So, folks talking to young people about how we can actually push back, following other accounts. Actually, my colleagues have named so many ways of resistance. I have also pushed for, literacy lessons like AI literacy lessons in schools – I should say algorithmic literacy lessons in schools. But also, young people have started to develop their own apps. They’ve also started to raise awareness, like in Black studies clubs that they make it their school around social media. They’ve been logging off, and actually encouraging their peers to log off. So there’s a lot of different ways, I think because I’m an educator, I really emphasize bringing this knowledge into the classroom, like teaching young people about this, but they themselves are developing so many counter strategies. Also, I’ll give one really unique one. Young people have found out that the videos get taken down, or they get hypercirculated based on the content of the comments, right? And so if young people comment things that are politically motivated, right, if they’re talking about, Black Lives Matter, that content, if it’s – that content will be taken down if they’re like, “Yes, Black Lives Matter, you know, justice for George Floyd,” that content, whatever that video is, gets taken down. But if they comment things like, “This is a cute shirt, drop the link.”  You know, “Where did you buy this?” that video gets hypercirculated. Now what they have done, is when it’s important political content, they comment things like, “Drop the Amazon link,” right? Because that actually protects that video and hypercirculates it. And so, they’ve been actually pushing back and tricking the algorithm to get videos taken down that they actually want taken down, by preying on the anti-Blackness, right? And preying on the hypercapitalist motives. 

[Dr. Riana Elyse Anderson]: Man, I love smart kids like this. It’s just amazing – they have the answers to everything. And thank you so much for bringing their voice into this space. So, I really appreciate your conversation with us today, and I want to invite all of our fantastic panelists back up for some good old Q&A. Let’s do it. Let’s jump back into it. And I certainly want to invite Drs. Heard-Garris and Cohen, to address this first set of questions. So, I want to go back to this idea of parenting,and what it is that our young people are experiencing and how, from my initial situation of racial socialization, which is often parent to child, how we’re seeing just a wide array of socializing agents, a wide array of where information is coming from and how all of that plays together. So really, when we’re thinking about how parents and caregivers can best support kiddos right now, what are these ways that folks can counteract what’s going on online? How can parents be on the lookout for what’s going on? What are some of the tips that we want to give when, racism does in fact happen in these spaces? What do we want parents to actually be able to do with these young folks? So again, want to kick it off to Drs. Heard-Garris and Cohen first.

[Dr. Alyssa Cohen]: Thanks so much for that question. So, I think as pediatricians we spend a lot of time giving anticipatory guidance to families, helping them understand in a kind of preemptive fashion, what types of challenges their children might be facing. And the goal of all of those conversations comes back to creating a safe space, so that children feel empowered to bring concerns to their parents and feel that they won’t be met with judgment, but will be met with active listening and understanding. And I want to highlight something that Dr. Willis brought up in his slides, which was, kind of the idea of having a family media plan and including discussions of racism online as part of that. It’s never too early to set forth the boundaries of what media consumption is going to look like for your family, and to parents that includes your own media use because you’re role modeling what behaviors your children are going to learn – but having some basic, kind of rules, as well as touch points around media use, can make it less daunting for children to come to parents when they encounter something that might be confusing or traumatizing, or go against, other parts of their belief system. For parents, I encourage you to, kind of take your own pulse and be present in the moment with your child if they’re experiencing something that is traumatic or difficult, or might bring up a lot of hard emotions in yourself. Because the way that you respond to that will set the tone for future conversations as well. And I just can’t emphasize how important it is to maintain that safe space, in a longitudinal fashion and set that example.

[Dr. Nia Heard-Garris]: I agree, we’re going to see if we can share a resource that the AAP uses to help families create a media plan.

[Dr. Riana Elyse Anderson]: Super helpful. Thank you for having those concrete suggestions. And even if you, for folks who may just ask themselves, “How do I institute something so formal into our family conversations?” I love to have something like meeting Mondays or family Friday – something that the kiddos know “Alright it’s coming.” And I’m a very corny adult, so I’m always like, “Kids, you already know what time it is, you know you’re going to hate this, but like, let’s lean into it.” I try to make it cheeky so that they know that this time is coming, but that they can look forward to it and have that. So those are just ways to have standing time for your family, but to integrate things like, “Today we’re going to discuss this thing that’s really important.” So I appreciate y’all having that Dr. Willis or Tanksley, anything to add about family discussions here?

[Dr. Henry A. Willis]: No, I think, I just want to elevate everything that Dr. Cohen and Dr. Heard-Garris said. I think these are all, perfect strategies. And the other thing that comes to mind, in thinking about just family and these conversations is, you know, thinking about just the importance of both trying to prepare our kids to, encounter this bias online, and also, you know, as parents, as adults knowing that, you know, we don’t know their experience, like, they know their experience. And so there is a little bit of, you know, just listening and having to realize that maybe the ways that we’ve been taught or that we, the ways that we think we should socialize, maybe there are some tweaks that we have to make to just better prepare our kids these days for some of the things that, you know, we didn’t have to navigate when we were youth.

[Dr. Riana Elyse Anderson]: Anything, Dr. Tanksley? We can move on if not.  Okay, excellent, thank you so much. So I know that everyone here wears different hats as well. And so I’m thinking again, really appreciate Dr. Cohen, how you said as pediatricians this is where you’re coming from. And so we’ve got a pretty good swath of the field here – pediatrics, psychology, education –  across some of these, specializations or fellowships. I’m just curious how we go into spaces where we’re, wearing these hats, for some of us, we are also parents. But especially for those of us who aren’t, like – how is it that – what are some of the responses that you’ve gotten from folks who are in those spaces –  teachers, clinicians, etc. – how do they respond to some of your findings, or some of your feedback? And what do you do to smooth out some of those conversations? 

[Dr. Nia Heard-Garris]: I can start, I will say, at the beginning of my career, I fought in a respectful way, against, you know, medicine is, now, accepts that social experiences impact the health and well-being of children – therefore, we should care. But prior to that, prior to thinking about adverse child experiences, structural racism, they’re like, “We do the medicine, we see the, we see the patients, we don’t need to really fully think and understand these other experiences and how they impact health.” And that wasn’t everybody, right? But just largely trying to understand what is the clinician’s role, pediatrician’s role, mental health provider’s role in this space. The pediatric clinicians are like, “Ah, I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know if we should wade into this.” And, you know, what we would liken it to is, “Okay, we talk about a lot of hard topics – we talk about drugs, we talk about sex – why can’t we have conversations about racism, right? Like why can’t we do that?” And so, I would say now things are much more accepted, like, “Oh, we should be talking about not only racism, but racial identity. How does that development happen? How should we be? Like Dr. Cohen said, be advising people on things to prepare for: “Okay – your kid is one, they may start walking, you need to prepare and put up gates and all of these things. They also notice race, like, how do we think about that? And how do we advise parents in that way?” So I think over the last couple of years that’s gotten better – I hope that we will still have the space to have those conversations and that pediatricians will still feel emboldened, to help families of all different colors and races to be able to navigate this world.

[Dr. Henry A. Willis]: I guess, one thing that, you know, in my experience that I’ll add, has been thinking about ways to help youth to manage these experiences on social media without telling them they can’t go on social media. I think that’s been one of the, you know, most kind of complex conversations that I’ve had with parents, with other clinicians, and with educators because, you know, I think the kind of knee jerk reaction is to say, “okay, these things are happening online, so like less phone time, less social media.” But like we talked about, social media is a part of adolescent development now. It’s a part, they interact with peers, they learn more about themselves, they learn more about the world. And so, you know, cutting it off completely can also have detrimental effects. And so, you know, I think we, we’ve made a lot of progress in kind of seeing both the pros and cons of social media, but I think the important thing is recognizing that for Black youth and youth of color, we have to have a very nuanced conversation in why social media is bad, and why it’s actually kind of also healthy for some of these youth. So like Dr…I think some, one of our colleagues’ mentioned earlier, our youth don’t go online to be discriminated against, they don’t go online to experience these. So, why do they go online? Why do they stay online? What are those positive spaces? What are those affirming experiences? – that they’re, that they love and that keeps them online, beyond the addictive nature, beyond the toxicity. And how can we have a nuanced conversation around how can we lift up those positive things, and how can we keep that in mind as educators, parents, clinicians, and also work with you collaboratively to try to reduce the impact of some of the more negative things.

[Dr. Tiera Tanskley]: Yeah, I definitely want to build on that. I have found that you should not tell kids, “Don’t use social media,” right? Because a) that’s, I think that’s just not realistic. I think they find things online that actually do feed their souls, right? This is where they’re finding their communities, especially when there was Black Twitter, right? A lot of students in my study were saying that like, “I go to a predominantly white institution”, like, “I don’t really have a lot of exposure to a ton of Black culture here, I go online and I find it,” right? “That’s where I actually have like my resistance, and my, I’m building my social consciousness and my soul is being fed,” right? And so, I think it’s important to actually position young people as experts, right? They are the experts on these technologies. And really just tapping into, I think, really framing this as a type of resistance, right, we’re pushing back. All of these, like, we have elders and ancestors who have engaged in resistance in different ways. And the moment right now requires a new type of resistance, right? Maybe an algorithmic resistance. And so when we’re thinking about how we navigate these spaces, how do we go into this, making sure that we get all of the good, and we protect ourselves from what’s problematic? And, I think one thing that has been helpful is like, almost like what you were saying, about, like, the meeting Mondays, right? Like in my classes, I have them do, like, a trending topic, and so students will actually bring up like, “oh my gosh, I saw deepfake videos of Black women that were really racist,” right, and we can talk about that. And, I think it’s really easy when they are positioned as, like, the investigators – they’re much more open and receptive to learning about why this might be problematic, where it’s coming from. And then they kind of take the reins from there because now they’re like invested in raising the consciousness of their peers and, as they say, like “building their algorithm brick by brick,” right? They’re now going to actively change what they see online. 

[Dr. Riana Elyse Anderson]: I love that before I jump in, Dr. Cohen, anything your way?

[Dr. Alyssa Cohen]: No, I completely agree with everything. And I think especially to Dr. Tanksley’s point about youth being the experts–I think sometimes it can be uncomfortable, as you know, as the adults in the room, to take that step back and let them lead. But it’s so, so important because we’re always going to be kind of behind the eight ball when it comes to what’s trending, what they’re seeing online – we just live in a different online environment. So, having the humility to say, like, “please, you know, teach me what this experience is like for you so that I can then bring, you know, whatever I have to offer in terms of support.” 

[Dr. Riana Elyse Anderson]: I mean, speak for yourself. I’m pretty above the, the bar here. No, I’m not. The kids tell me stuff all the time I’m like, “oh, I’m old.” Okay, so let’s actually stick with our babies for a minute. So, I’m holding two different things in my heart. One is that, and Dr. Willis, I think you set this up really beautifully with your talk, it can be a really damaging space for their psychological, or physical, educational well-being. And it can be really empowering when they know how to create content in a way that is supportive, when they’re able to troubleshoot and find things that are, challenging, as you just said Dr. Tanksley. So, let’s talk about that duality for a bit. How can we empower young people so that they can be in these spaces to be these content creators, to be critical consumers of this media, while managing, acknowledging some of the realities of what can happen, what they can be exposed to, what, what the world, you know, puts out and allows, and proliferates. So talk to me about that duality and how you all navigate that in your work.

[Dr. Tiera Tanskley]: I can try, try to start. So, I mentioned that I have a summer program, it’s a five week summer program, Race Abolition and Artificial Intelligence, and it’s all about this, like fostering critical algorithmic literacies, right? And I’ll say that, we do a host of activities – they learn a lot about the sociotechnical infrastructures of these tools, various tool–video games, social media, AI chat bots, educational technologies, you name it, robots–you know, we’re learning it. And I have found that the outcomes every time, are the youth say that “in learning about how anti-Blackness becomes encoded, I actually, I feel empowered online, like I am no longer, it’s like that protective factor, right?” They see racism, and they’re like, “oh, that’s just Elon Musk’s grok,” you know? They feel like they, I don’t know how to really explain it, but like, it, it’s it’s bouncing off, right? And they feel more empowered to disengage I think as well. And they’re more informed about which apps, how much time they want to spend, right? Who to follow and why? And so, you know, again, my domain is really education – I have found that that’s been the most powerful, from the voices of young people, right? Saying that like, “man we need to have classes like this everywhere because this has changed…completely has transformed my experiences online to actually just know how these systems work.” And so I encourage folks, if you can, get involved in programs – there’s so many different types of programs out there – but there’s also, institutes that have like curriculum that you can do at home, like Common Sense and Digital Promise, right? There’s a lot of resources out there. But yeah, for me, I think, they, the class essentially, we all know that racism exists, right? It’s, my class is Black kids. So, I’m not necessarily introducing something new to them. I’m not traumatizing them by talking about racism being prevalent. And so, I think being explicit about it, but also embedding so much joy and hope, right? We also look at – we watched the Alabama Brawl, right? And that was actually this summer, they said that was their favorite thing because it was joyous and it was collective, right? And so really talking about like, what resistance looks like online and, a lot of hope and looking at abolitionist technologies, here’s the platforms that Black folks have made by and for us, right? This is what their content moderation systems look like, like this is why the space is different. All of those things, I think, paint technology more broadly, and encourages them to honestly become like computer scientists and technologists who can design better systems. So I know I’m ranting, but essentially, I think education, and this like critical consciousness across domains – not just as the user, but also as a designer, right, as an advocate, etc. – can be really powerful.

[Dr. Riana Elyse Anderson]: Quick moderator point of privilege here, Dr. Willis, you will be right next, I promise. I just wanted to summarize what you said for any of our policymakers or legislators on the call. What Dr. Tanksley just said was that introducing content to young people about race and racism does not lead to negative outcomes. And in fact, because it’s a protective factor, leads to better outcomes, and that is for youth of all races and colors. So thank you for bringing that fun factoid in the room. Dr. Willis, back to you.

[Dr. Henry A. Willis]: Yeah, I mean, I wish I loved everything you said, Dr. Tanksley. It’s just sparked so many, just thoughts and follow ups. So that’s why I was excited to jump in. But I, not only agree that it makes me think of a lot of things that I’ve seen in my current research with Black teens. I’ve seen a lot of those things that you just mentioned, that they know how to choose safe platforms. They talk about, like, you know, “I go on, you know, I go on Pinterest or I go on YouTube because nobody’s starting beef in a YouTube comments because that’s just weird.” So, you know, like, they know how to navigate the pros and cons of racism and what it looks like on these different platforms. But it also, in my work, I’ve also seen how, like what you said, Dr. Anderson, those tried and true things that we know work–like racial socialization and promoting racial ethnic identity beliefs–they still work in the online space. I’ve had teams say that like, “oh, I, you know, I don’t really feel anything when I see like, racist memes online because I know who I am and I know, like, I love being Black.” So it’s like, again, even though we, you know, youth need more tools, those things that we, that Black parents and Black educators and clinicians that work with, with Black youth and youth of color, have been doing still work in the online space. And something that I’m trying to do now in my work, is try to help teen Black teens, in particular use technology and digital media in ways to promote Black joy and to counter some of the racism online. So this is a a brief, shameless plug, but at the University of Maryland, College Park, I’m starting a ten week, internship program for Black teens in the area where they’re going to learn a different clinical techniques about stimulating Black joy, and they’re going to actually be given resources to create social media campaigns, podcasts, whatever they want to promote Black joy in the social media space. And so, I’ll try to send around that information to folks. So if you know people, Black teens, Black families in the DC, Maryland area, we would love to have them a part of our cohort.

[Dr. Nia Heard-Garris]: That’s amazing. If I can just say this is not necessarily what’s supposed to be in the social media space, but it ended in the social media space – we also last summer, and then maybe the two summers above that, before that, took a cohort of youth and talked to them about structural racism, and then also gave them tools for activism. And the reason why we even entered that space is because of the study Dr. Cohen and I did, where youth talk about online activism. They’re like, “this is one form of activism that we really, do use, but we’re careful about it because we don’t want to promote fake news, we don’t want to post stories that aren’t true and real and all of that.” But, we were so inspired by their willingness and boldness to be activists online that we took some of what they were telling us, and some of the work that we’ve seen for decades – civil rights movement, things before and after that, that have worked. And so we taught the youth how to be activists, and what specifically, problems were impacting their lives. And so one of the things that they did last summer was they talked about the school to prison pipeline. And so they also did campaigns, and they went to social media, because that’s where a lot of them spend their time,  about why there were more, student, or school resource officers, aka police in their schools than guidance counselors. And so I think that’s another example of just thinking about youth are able to see, like structural racism, racism in general, that this is a problem and also can actively work on solutions and be the – at the forefront of ways to disrupt that. So, we’re like minds, Dr. Willis.

[Dr. Alyssa Cohen]: And I’ll just echo what, I mean, everyone’s kind of pointing out these amazing programs that I’m like, so excited to hear about and that I think youth could so benefit from learning through, and then also just on like the day to day interpersonal level, I think all of us have an opportunity to just open the communication with curiosity, acknowledge that youth are spending all of their time online and that these things are coming up. But also to, just kind of let them, develop their expertise in whatever way they see fit and not immediately shutting down conversations about social media because of our own discomfort. Like Dr. Tanksley said, you know, if we say, “Just stay offline,” then we’re really missing the point and nobody’s going to kind of come back to us with follow up questions. So, being curious in that way, I think can go a long way in professional and personal relationships. 

[Dr. Riana Elyse Anderson]: Excellent. Thank you. Just also a quick plug on my side as well. We’ve developed an app for young people to be able to, after they’ve experienced racism, to be able to get online, on this app, and meet with me, they’re friendly Dr. Ri, to discuss this, in real time. So just, letting folks know that we’re using those technologies, or we’re using what we’ve learned, and putting it back into the real world format. So we’re doing a lot to contend with this, and what we would hope is that folks on the side of industry, or organization, or government, would take heed to what is important to restrict some of this so that the prevention and intervention efforts don’t have to come on our side. Alright, folks, we’ve got just a few minutes. So this is going to be rapid fire, it’s going to be for whoever is ready. One set of questions that we haven’t really touched on –  so I want to make sure that we’re giving some time to this – is for folks who are working with young people who are not of color, and need to understand what their role is in this space. So we’re thinking about educators working with folks who are not of color. How can some of these students inadvertently play a part in ignoring racism? And how can we teach children who are not of color to see the racism and discrimination online and be aware of it? So both as perpetrators and observers, how can we help young folks who are not of color, play a role in this, in stopping this?

[Dr. Alyssa Cohen]: I want to jump in and just say the importance of counter-narratives in kind of going against some of this algorithmic bias, and some of the stories that are popping up without youth even noticing that they’re being targeted by them. So, as early as possible, it’s important for all youth to be exposed to diverse stories, diverse media, and for that to be a conversation that people are having within their schools, within their families, within healthcare settings, even. I think that having examples to draw on, of really positive stories or experiences, can go a long way in preventing this kind of red pilling, radicalization, the integration of beliefs that go against somebody’s value system. And having all of these conversations from a place of support and love, because we know that, sometimes some teens, especially white males, as Dr. Tanksley mentioned, find a sense of belonging in these really dangerous and racist online communities. So it’s really important to support belonging outside of those spaces so that it doesn’t create a void for those beliefs to seep in.

[Dr. Henry A. Willis]: Yeah, I’ll just add a couple thoughts. I think one is education around racism, structural racism, and also what it looks like online for youth to learn. Youth of color, like the point that was made earlier, it doesn’t, you know, cause distress long term. It actually can be helpful, long term. And I think that will help lead to what I just made up in my head, called algorithmic allyship – anybody can use it, it’s not trademarked yet. But, I was really thinking of just all the great strategies that you mentioned, Dr. Tanksley, and how Black youth have been kind of gaming the algorithm system, and so we need all youth to be doing that same thing. So how can we make sure that youth that aren’t of color, they aren’t contributing to those views, those likes, those clicks, to that racist content – even if it’s passive, even if it’s just out of curiosity. So I think that’s why the importance of knowing what it is, and knowing the harm it causes, can kind of equip those youth to be an ally in these digital spaces. So yeah, those are pieces that I like.

[Dr. Riana Elyse Anderson]: Thank you so much, Dr. Willis. We are going to wrap, but I want to make sure that we’re getting the last few words from these fantastic panelists. I will add, one other question asked the same of parents. So what if we are parents of folks who are not of color – what is it that we can do? That short answer is the exact same thing that we’ve been saying for everyone. So, socialization, or teaching children about race and racism is not incumbent just on parents of color– in fact, it is required of every parent, every pediatrician, every teacher, every clinician, anyone on this call with ears to hear, and eyes to read, and braille to manipulate. Like we should all be able to understand that these conversations have to happen with all children, because all children take part in the perpetration and the experience of it. So with that, I want to turn it over to my fantastic panelists – I’m going to give you 20, no, Kris is on so, you get three seconds. Tiera, final comment, go Tiera, hit it.

[Dr. Tiera Tanksley]: Wait, I don’t, I don’t remember the question.

[Dr. Riana Elyse Anderson]: Final comment. What do you have, what’s the thing that you want people to walk away with? Final thing.

[Dr. Tiera Tanksley]: Okay, we need to have collective resistance against problematic technologies. We need regulation, y’all – It can’t just all be placed on our young people to fight, like, we also need these tools to be regulated. 

[Dr. Riana Elyse Anderson]: Period. Great. Nia. Hit it. 

[Dr. Nia Heard-Garris]: Yeah. I want people to know that there are very real consequences to vicarious and non-vicarious racism–and it’s not in our heads, it’s not imagined –there’s decades of study. So we need to be advocating against abolishment of all racism. 

[Dr. Riana Elyse Anderson]: Five stars. Alyssa?

[Dr. Alyssa Cohen]: Social media is not going anywhere. We need to be ready to support youth where they’re at. 

[Dr. Riana Elyse Anderson]: Perf. And Henry, final comment. 

[Dr. Henry A. Willis]: Yeah, we need to center youth. So, when we’re doing these research, when we’re doing these different outreach activities, let’s center youth, let’s hear their voices because they have a lot of great strategies, and things that we can learn from.

[Dr. Riana Elyse Anderson]: Thank you so much. It’s been a pleasure. Kris, we’re taking it back to you. 

[Kris Perry]: Thank you, Riana and our panelists for such a thoughtful, insightful conversation. And thanks to all of you for your questions and engagement. On behalf of Children and Screens, thank you for spending part of your day with us and for the work you do to support young people. If you found today’s webinar insightful, help us keep the conversation going by making a donation today. Just scan the QR code on the screen, or visit childrenandscreens.org to give. Thank you.