Abstract
Social media platforms offer powerful affordances and constraints-helping build relationships, while also facilitating misinformation and abuse. To understand how young people navigate online communities and allyship on- and offline, we interviewed a diverse group of 55 U.S. teens, ages 18-19, to see how they framed others regarding race, gender, and sexuality. Frames were speculative, empathetic, and education- and action-oriented, and suggest implications for improving online allyship, defining "othering" more broadly, converting passive empathy into transformative empathy, and making online spaces more inclusive. We resist the deficit-approach common to research about youth, foregrounding teens' experiences to show that online activities have transformative potential.