Examining the impacts of privacy awareness on user's self-disclosure on social media
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This research aims to investigate the impact of users' privacy awareness on their self-disclosing behavior. Our primary research question is to investigate how young social media users feel about the benefits and risks of disclosing them-selves on social media and how risk-benefit awareness influences the assess-ment of their self-disclosure. Based on the data we recorded, the factor analysis, and three-way ANOVA, we conclude that users who know more about privacy benefits share more on social media (F= 36.291; df 1; sig < .001) while those who know less about the benefits disclose less on social media. According to the analysis, users who know more about self-disclosure risks share less on so-cial media (F= 7.001; df 1; sig < .001). Users disclose less information on so-cial media platforms based on the different levels of their risk perceptions (df 3, F=.715, sig < 0.5). This indicates that risks on social media platforms vary to some degree. We saw that people's sharing habits based on their levels of risk, benefits, and social media platforms can vary. One thing that remained certain was users' main benefit for engaging and disclosing on social media is their need to stay in touch with friends and their need for community. On the flip side, the main risk was the need not to be impersonated and misunderstood by people. Based on a simple frequency analysis of the open-ended questions we asked In our data collection, the most highlighted words in our responses were "people" and "friends". These were the two main words that stood out in all the data we collected concerning the benefits, risks, and intention to self-disclose.
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