Keywords
Social Media
trust
responsibility
adolescents
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Copyright (c) 2026 Jane Müller, Moritz Tischer, Maike Tischendorf, Dora Staib, Mareike Thumel
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Abstract
Boundary violations and forms of sexualised violence are by no means uncommon for female-identified young people when they use social media. This paper examines technology-mediated sexualised violence as moments of disruption within media practices and explores how young people make sense of such experiences, what expectations they have of protection from platforms, and how responsibility for violence is negotiated. Based on focused media ethnographies involving 28 young people, six cases are analysed in which technology-mediated sexualised violence was addressed. The analysis is conducted using situational analysis and reconstructs discursive positions on responsibility and protection. The results show that trust in platforms is often implicitly effective and only becomes visible where protection is expected, but not provided. In such situations, forms of mistrust management emerge, in which young people adapt their own practices and increasingly place the responsibility for protection on themselves. An explicit attribution of perpetrator responsibility, however, remains largely absent from the data. The paper thus demonstrates that trust, protection and attributions of responsibility are relationally organised and represent a central approach to analysing technology-mediated sexualised violence in young people’s everyday lives.
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