Privacy concerns on social networking sites: Interplay among posting types, content, and audiences

Abstract

This study examines the impact of the types of posting, information types, and privacy concerns toward audience types across two types of social networking sites (SNSs), Facebook and Twitter. The findings indicate that on Facebook, young SNS users are more concerned about other users posting on their own timeline than other types of posting. On Twitter, young SNS users are more concerned about their own tweets than other users retweeting their tweets. The study also found that different content within different posting types has varying influence on privacy concerns constructed by the user based on three audience types (marketer, authoritative, distant relations). Implications for policy-making and suggestions for future research are discussed.