Our new randomised controlled trial (RCT) explored how children (13 – 15 year olds, and 16 – 17 year olds) and adults react to being defaulted into safe-by-design social media profile settings. We find strong support for these settings, and high rates of retention across all ages.
Past RCTs by Ofcom’s Behavioural Insights Hub have found encouraging evidence that default settings affect users’ online choices. For example, our past trials have shown:
- When adults are defaulted into being able to see "All content types" (which includes potentially harmful content) on a mock video sharing platform, only 15% of adults opted instead for "Reduced sensitive content". When neither option was pre-selected, 24% chose the reduced option. However, when "Reduced sensitive content" was pre-selected as the default, 42% of users accepted it.
- In a separate trial involving children: when defaulted into "Don’t recommend harmful content" setting, nearly 7 out of 10 children maintained that choice, compared to only 5 out of 10 when no default was presented.
Our new trial achieves two aims over-and-above this previous work. Firstly, we include both children and adults in the same experiment, allowing for direct behavioural comparisons under the same conditions. Secondly, we move beyond sensitive content settings to other standard social media settings: location sharing, direct messaging, and network expansion. As well as age differences, we also tested interventions (e.g. supportive messaging) to encourage retention of settings.
Across all age groups we observed high rates of retention for defaults that offer more safety (but more restriction). Retention was also similarly high across all types of settings. Our accompanying survey also showed high levels of support across all groups for safety-by-design defaults. While retention of defaults was high, we caution that mock online trials cannot fully replicate the real-world influences on decision-making, such as social norms and peer influence in these contexts.
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