This is a selection of research reports to enhance the online harms evidence base. This research has helped improve understanding of harms experienced by adults and children, as well as how online harm can be measured.
Bias, Skew, and Search Engines Are Sufficient to Explain Online Toxicity
The Slow Death of Online Safety
Frontiers | Cyber-mobbing, technology-facilitated abuse and online violence
This article collection will explore the pressing issues of cyber-mobbing, technology-facilitated abuse and online violence, including online abuse, stalking...
Beyond APIs: Collecting Web Data for Research using the National Internet Observatory
Widespread Internet use offers unprecedented opportunities to study human behavior at scale, yet researchers face significant ethical and technical barriers when attempting to collect data for academic studies.
Reading the Digital Safety Act with My Mastodon Admin Hat On
Back in 2024, I published a reading of the Online Harms Act from my perspective as an admin of a Mastodon instance. The Online Harms Act was a proposed Canadian bill meant to regulate social media to prevent harmful content, particularly hate speech and child abuse materials. While the Online Harms Act ultimately did not come to pass (due the proroguing of Parliament later that year), the Carney Liberal government is bringing much of it back with a new Digital Safety Act. In this post, I am also giving the new Act a look from the perspective of a Mastodon admin.
Google AI Overviews put people at risk of harm with misleading health advice
Exclusive: Inaccurate information presented in summaries, Guardian investigation finds
Resist ‘dangerous and socially unacceptable’ age checks for social media, scientists warn
Computer scientists are campaigning against the global march toward age checks online.
The "Segregate-and-Suppress" Approach to Regulating Child Safety Online
<div> In an effort to protect children online, regulators around the country and the world are enacting laws that compel Internet publishers to age-authenticat
The Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Violence Against Women and Girls • Stimson Center
Examining the impact of AI on violence against women and girls, particularly concerning disinformation, online abuse, and women’s participation in public life.
Text - S.1748 - 119th Congress (2025-2026): Kids Online Safety Act
Text for S.1748 - 119th Congress (2025-2026): Kids Online Safety Act
14 Theses on Online Political Violence
The old world of content safety practices is dead, and the new one is struggling to be born.
The Kids Online Safety Act Will Make the Internet Worse for Everyone
Lawmakers who support KOSA today are choosing to trust the current administration, and future administrations, to define what youth—and to some degree, all of us—should be allowed to read online.
How the KOSA and KIDS Acts will Harm Vulnerable Teenagers
KOSA & the KIDS Act harm vulnerable teenagers by cutting them off from online communities & support systems, & could be used to censor LGBTQ content for minors.
Guide to Responsible, Strategic Reporting on Hate and Extremism
Recommendations for researchers, journalists and others on how to avoid unintentionally bolstering extremists and causing additional harm.
But anyway, papers since you asked: - DOI:10.1371 Digital Social Norm Enforcement: Online Firestorms in Social Media - Deliberation and Identity Rules: The Effect of Anonymity, Pseudonyms and Real-Name Requirements on the Cognitive Complexity of Online News Comments doi.org/10.1177/0032321719891385
Does social media harm everyone? No. But it harms *most* adolescents. However, not all platforms are harmful. An analysis of 44,211 diaries from 479 adolescents over 100 days finds that 60% of adolescents experienced small, negative effects of social media link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12144-025-08…
