Over the last two decades, online safety education has emerged as a new field of research focusing on concerns about a myriad of cyber risks. These risks range from online sexual exploitation through to the reproduction of social inequalities. The main assumption underlying this field is that online risks can be mitigated via educational interventions, and significant discrepancies can be observed between the proposed approaches to online safety education. In this article, we develop an analytical model based on prevalent concepts of digital citizenship and narratives of technologies to identify four different approaches to online safety education in the academic literature; that is, safeguarding, equipping, empowering and resisting. Each of these approaches draws on different assumptions on what constitutes as ‘online risk’ and ‘digital education’. Through a systematic literature review, we analyse 75 journal articles and examine the approaches to online safety education that these studies adopt. Our analysis reveals a dominance of approaches that adopt limited concepts of digital citizenship and acritical views of technology. Context and implications. This article provides an analytical framework that transposes concepts of digital citizenship with narratives of technology. This framework is used to identify approaches towards online safety education in the literature. The review found a problematic dominance of acritical views of digital citizenship and technology, which overlook the socio‐political contexts and implications of online safety education. As this framework considers a broader and more politically situated range of online risks (from cyberbullying and digital exclusion through to discriminatory design and the tyranny of algorithms) and educational solutions (i.e., safeguarding, equipping, empowering and resisting), it serves to enrich current debates about ‘digital risks’ and has the potential to assist policymakers, researchers and educators to make critically informed decisions regarding online safety education.