Timeliness Matters: Leveraging Reinforcement Learning on Social Media Data to Prioritize High-Risk Conversations for Promoting Youth Online Safety

Ensuring the online safety of youth has motivated research towards the development of machine learning (ML) methods capable of accurately detecting social media risks after-the-fact. However, for these detection models to be effective, they must proactively identify high-risk scenarios (e.g., sexual solicitations, cyberbullying) to mitigate harm. This `real-time' responsiveness is a recognized challenge within the risk detection literature. Therefore, this paper presents a novel two-level framework that first uses reinforcement learning to identify conversation stop points to prioritize messages for evaluation. Then, we optimize state-of-the-art deep learning models to accurately categorize risk priority (low, high). We apply this framework to a time-based simulation using a rich dataset of 23K private conversations with over 7 million messages donated by 194 youth (ages 13-21). We conducted an experiment comparing our new approach to a traditional conversation-level baseline. We found that the timeliness of conversations significantly improved from over 2 hours to approximately 16 minutes with only a slight reduction in accuracy (0.88 to 0.84). This study advances real-time detection approaches for social media data and provides a benchmark for future training reinforcement learning that prioritizes the timeliness of classifying high-risk conversations.