AI Digital Safety & Puerto Rican Youth

When Setzer Garcia started interacting with the Character.AI chatbot in 2023, just after his 14th birthday, his mother, Megan, thought it was like a video game. When Setzer died from suicide within less than a year, she was confronted with the very different reality of what he had experienced. “I want them to understand that this is a platform that the designers chose to put out without proper guardrails, safety measures, or testing, and it is a product that is designed to keep our kids addicted and to manipulate them,” Megan shared in an interview with CNN (Duffy, 2024). Megan argues that Character.AI, a platform promoting itself as “AI that feels alive,” intentionally neglected necessary safety protocols. This negligence resulted in her son forming an unhealthy bond with a chatbot, leading him to isolate himself from his family and ultimately playing a role in his death, according to his mother (Duffy, 2024).

As emerging AI technologies become increasingly integrated into young people’s lives, researchers, parents, organizations, and governmental agencies must strive to understand better how youth perceive digital risks and build relationships with AI systems. Without this informed understanding, safety measures will continue to fall short for vulnerable communities like children. A key aspect of my work is ensuring that digital safety interventions are culturally appropriate, evidence-based, and address the actual issues Puerto Rican youth face, rather than imposing one-size-fits-all solutions that may unintentionally harm the communities they seek to protect.

While Setzer Garcia’s story happened in Florida, digital threats facing children extend across the entire United States and its territories. In this broader context of online dangers, my research aims to explore how Puerto Rican youth understand digital safety within their cultural environment. This focus is particularly timely due to Puerto Rico’s newly implemented broadband infrastructure initiative, which presents a unique opportunity to study how digital safety integrates with broader literacy efforts. While existing research documents online harms affecting Caribbean youth, including AI-related cases leading to suicide attempts (Wilkinson et al., 2024), the literature predominantly centers on English-speaking nations, leaving substantial gaps in understanding the region’s nuances. Recent data underscores the urgency of this research, where AI adoption in Puerto Rico has surged dramatically from 6% in 2023 to 40% in 2024, with 75% of respondents aware of AI expressing concerns about AI-generated misinformation, according to a study of 1,000 Puerto Ricans (Kantrow-Vázquez 2024). Despite limited documentation, these findings underscore the critical digital safety threats facing the island’s youth.

Motivated by these concerning trends related to online safety and security, my research examines how Puerto Rican youth navigate similar digital risks in their cultural context, a focus deeply connected to my heritage. As a Puerto Rican woman with Taíno Indigenous roots whose father was born on the island, this work allows me to give back to my community in a meaningful way while reconnecting with my cultural identity. Building on this personal connection, my dissertation will explore how these young people’s unique cultural perspectives influence their understanding of digital safety, with the goal of helping civil society organizations better conceptualize and address AI risks related to child safety.

This summer, I’ll begin preliminary scoping for my research by meeting with Puerto Rican organizations to obtain firsthand insights into challenges related to technology accessibility, internet connectivity, and digital literacy. I’m particularly interested in understanding how children are regarded in existing initiatives, such as the island’s Broadband Program, which represents an inspiring effort to connect every island resident to the internet and promote digital literacy. Through semi-structured interviews and by attending digital literacy workshops, I’ll gather valuable knowledge to shape my dissertation while developing frameworks that can hopefully inform similar efforts in other multilingual communities typically overlooked in English-language research.

As I embark on this research journey, I am deeply motivated by the potential for this work to make a meaningful difference. I hope these culturally informed approaches will guide the creation and implementation of the online safeguards that all children deserve, not only in Puerto Rico but also around the world.

Please visit my LinkedIn profile or email me to learn more about my work and connect professionally.

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