PRISM: Evaluating a Rule-Based, Scenario-Driven Social Media Privacy Education Program for Young Autistic Adults

Young autistic adults may garner benefits through social media but also disproportionately experience privacy harms. Prior research found that these harms often stem from perceiving the affordances of social media differently than the general population, leading to unintentional risky behaviors and interactions with others. While educational interventions have been shown to increase social media privacy literacy for the general population, research has yet to focus on effective educational interventions for autistic young adults. We address this gap by developing and deploying Privacy Rules for Inclusive Social Media (PRISM), a classroom-based educational intervention tailored to the unique risks and neurodevelopmental differences of this population. Twenty-nine autistic students with substantial (level 2) support needs participated in a 14-week social media privacy literacy class. During these classes, participants often communicated their existing rule-based “all or nothing” approaches to privacy management (such as completely disengaging from social media to avoid privacy issues). Our course focused on empowering them by providing more nuanced guidance on safe privacy practices through the use of scenario-based formats and contextual, rule-based scenarios. Using pre- and post-knowledge assessments for each of our 6 course topics, our intervention led to a statistically significant increase in their making safer social media privacy decisions. We conclude with recommendations for how privacy educators and technology designers can leverage neuro-affirming educational interventions to increase privacy literacy for autistic social media users.