The Platform Decides the Posting: Information Sharing Stratification in Social Media

Abstract

Prior research has found that social media users share different kinds of information on different social media sites based on the expected audience for those sites. This information sharing stratification has an influence of the social media users’ expectations of privacy with respect to the type information shared. The objective of this paper is to investigate the various kinds of information shared and accessed on different social media platforms, and to consider the expectation of privacy associated with the various types of information shared.This study takes a large-scale qualitative approach to considering the kinds of information accessed and shared on different social media platforms. To conduct this study, the researchers surveyed 871 participants (415 men, 454 women, 2 not reporting; 4 Hispanic, 77 African-American, 657 White, 59 Asian, 19 Other) and asked open-ended questions about the participants’ use of four popular social media platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat. The prompt for their answer was, “I use x social media because…”The researchers employed a grounded theory textual analysis approach to analyzing the data. The participants’ replies for each platform were read and then coded into major categories. Categories were refined using a constant comparative method and the coded data were organized around major emergent themes. These themes were then analyzed for the kind of information shared and/or accessed, as well as the concomitant expectation of privacy for that kind of information.This paper is timely as regulators in the United States, and across the globe, are attempting to implement or revise regulations and policy related to privacy in online social media. One of the operative questions is about user information sharing online, particularly in social media spaces. This study aims to fill in the gaps in research about the different types of information shared on various social media platforms.This paper ends with policy recommendations.