The ‘ProTechThem’ project is led by researchers at the University of Southampton and supported by several project partners including The UK’s DCMS, and child safety organisations. The research, which started in 2021, is interdisciplinary. It draws on an innovative combination of quantitative, qualitative, and Natural Language Processing methods.
So far, we have conducted a survey of over 1000 UK parents and over 500 Italian parents (2024), 50 semi-structured interviews with parents involved in sharenting in both countries (2024), a digital ethnography of sharenting on social media (2022), news media analysis (2022), and large language modelling (ongoing). Our research has uncovered several sharenting-related harms targeted at children. Examples are identity related-crimes, cyberbullying, and harassment.
Insights from the research have informed the production of a policy brief (available in Resources) and will also underpin the design of additional outputs. These include, (1) a risk awareness checklist that will improve knowledge and understanding of sharenting risks and harms, (2) an awareness raising animated video, and (3) a Large Language Model (LLM) for detecting and removing risky content online, to protect children affected by sharenting. These will support cybersecurity policy and practice.
Go to Recent Publications to access recent papers from the project. The section will be updated as more outputs emerge.