Influence of Privacy Fatigue of Social Media Users on Their Privacy Protection Disengagement Behaviour—A PSM based Analysis

Abstract

This paper aims to examine the net effect of privacy fatigue of social media users on privacy protection disengagement behaviour, which is helpful to address the users’ privacy issue in the new stage of social media digitalization. Applying the Propensity Score Matching (PSM) methodology, the authors conduct the data analysis of 1,734 samples of social media users and eliminates the selectivity error caused by individual characteristic variables so as to improve the prediction accuracy of variable causality. Their research not only validates the causal relationship between privacy fatigue and privacy protection disengagement, proving that privacy fatigue can directly lead to privacy protection disengagement behaviour but also reveals that the individual characteristic variables have heterogeneous effects on the influence of privacy fatigue on protection disengagement behaviour.