Mastering the challenge of balancing self-disclosure and privacy in social media

Abstract

Humans have the urge to self-disclose, which is nowadays often satisfied on social media platforms. While the affordances of contemporary social media applications help to indulge this urge, they also pose a significant challenge. People are usually good at leveraging self-disclosure in a way that gratifications are increased and disadvantages are minimized - for example, by avoiding pitfalls such as revealing too intimate information to a large audience. However, when trying to balance self-disclosure gratifications and privacy risks on social media platforms, users are not always able to take rational decisions as suggested in the 'privacy calculus' approach. Instead, recent research indicates that users are prone to biases which hinder rational calculations of advantages and disadvantages - especially caused by social media cues. Users therefore need to be supported in order to master self-disclosure decisions.