The Use of Facebook and its Implications: The Motivations for Revisiting and Regular Users’ Ethical Attitude

Abstract

Social Network Sites (SNSs) has brought enormous impact to the whole world; it has introduced a new way of socializing via the cyber world. Among all SNSs, Facebook (FB) is one of the most successful SNSs, which has grown exponentially in the last two years. Therefore, FB was chosen as the theme of the study so as to discover insightful details regarding SNSs. Being transparent is how FB works; it is very popular but it also causes a lot of controversy, such as arguments and disagreements regarding privacy. It attracts a lot of attention and garners plenty of criticism, which also entails public concerns about the ethics of information posting and sharing. This study examined the relationship of six constructs: Social Influence, Perceived Trust, Habit, Inter-Personal Privacy Concerns, Continuance Intention and Ethical Attitude towards IPS. A quantitative survey was conducted in order to: 1. identify whether there are relationships among these constructs; 2. evaluate frequent FB users’ ethical attitude on information sharing and posting; and 3. assess their continuance intention of using FB. Findings indicate there are positive relationships among constructs. The study results also indicate that the continuous use of FB positively influences users’ ethical attitude towards IPS. They deem that what others think about their behavior on FB is important to them. FB users share tacit knowledge on morally sharing and posting information. Meanwhile, they would also judge the others’ FB behavior with a high perception of ethics.