Digital Transformation as a Challenge for Social Sustainability: Participation, Fairness, and Inclusion in Child and Youth Services in the Age of AI-Based Systems

This article examines the digital transformation of child and youth welfare from a socially sustainable and technologically ethical perspective. It reconstructs the role of cyber-physical and digital technologies— including mobile applications, socio-digital platforms, and generative AI systems—using a problem- exploratory, phenomenologically informed analytical approach. Methodologically, the study is based on a systematic literature review in accordance with PRISMA-Flow and a PESTEL-oriented contextualization to determine the political-legal, economic, socio-cultural, technological, ecological- sustainable, and regulatory environmental factors of digital social welfare (PRISMA statement, 2020). Within this factual frame of reference, the present study shows that, in today's reality, digital technologies have the potential to strengthen the participation, inclusion, and autonomy of young people and, at the same time, to meet user-centered design requirements in accordance with DIN EN ISO 9241-110, WCAG 2.2, and BITV 2.0, but their implementation reproduces systemic risks. These relate in particular to surveillance tendencies, algorithmic distortions, normatively questionable profiling logic, and increasing asymmetry in the management of personal data. According to the analysis, digital interventions that declare their aim to be empowerment often reinforce existing structures of inequality in their praxeological operationalization and create an epistemically and data protection-wise ambivalent relationship between young users and welfare institutions. With these realities in mind, issues of data ownership, the copyright implications of generative AI (Sections 16, 44b, and 60d of the German Copyright Act (UrhG)), and the long-term management of minors' digital identities are critically discussed. Further, in the praxeological view, a normative epistemic framework for action emerges that reveals how inclusive, prejudice-resistant, and participatory design practices can be incorporated into the relevant information technology standards and the regulatory and ethically structured systems to create a comprehensively socially sustainable, justice-oriented, and child-welfare-oriented architecture of digital care. To this extent, the contribution consolidates an epistemic, normative, and organizational-theoretical frame of reference that understands digitally transformed youth welfare in the AI-driven welfare state as a socio-technical structure and structures its design along principles of justice, responsiveness, inclusive participation, and sustainable capacity to act. As a result, the constitutive conditions for the permanently secured and non-discriminatory participation of young people are systematically elaborated.