Instagram Data Donation: A Case Study on Collecting Ecologically Valid Social Media Data for the Purpose of Adolescent Online Risk Detection

ABSTRACT In this work, we present a case study on an Instagram Data Donation (IGDD) project, which is a user study and web-based platform for youth (ages 13-21) to donate and annotate their Instagram data with the goal of improving adolescent online safety. We employed human-centered design principles to create an ecologically valid dataset that will be utilized to provide insights from teens’ private social media interactions and train machine learning models to detect online risks. Our work provides practical insights and implications for Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) researchers that collect and study social media data to address sensitive problems relating to societal good.