Profile Owner Research Articles

Impressions on Social Networking Sites: Examining the Influence of Frequency of Status Updates and Likes on Judgments of Observers

ABSTRACTThis study explores how the number of status updates and markers of approval on social networking site profiles affect observers’ impressions of a profile owner’s personality and character. Using signaling theory and Brunswik’s lens model, the broader aim of this study was to examine whether the presentation of content on profiles affects inference making of the profile owner’s character. An experimental design was employed among college students to test whether the frequency of status updates and “Likes” on those updates affect initial impressions of a profile owner’s psychological state and social skills deficits and in turn later appraisals of attractiveness and credibility. The findings indicated that fewer status updates on a profile led to judgments of the profile owner as more depressed and socially unskilled than owners who post status updates more frequently. Impressions concerning depression and social skills deficits biased later judgments of the owner’s attractiveness but not credibility.

Beware of Selfies: The Impact of Photo Type on Impression Formation Based on Social Networking Profiles.

Users of social networking sites such as Facebook frequently post self-portraits on their profiles. While research has begun to analyze the motivations for posting such pictures, less is known about how selfies are evaluated by recipients. Although producers of selfies typically aim to create a positive impression, selfies may also be regarded as narcissistic and therefore fail to achieve the intended goal. The aim of this study is to examine the potentially ambivalent reception of selfies compared to photos taken by others based on the Brunswik lens model Brunswik (1956). In a between-subjects online experiment (N = 297), Facebook profile mockups were shown which differed with regard to picture type (selfie vs. photo taken by others), gender of the profile owner (female vs. male), and number of individuals within a picture (single person vs. group). Results revealed that selfies were indeed evaluated more negatively than photos taken by others. Persons in selfies were rated as less trustworthy, less socially attractive, less open to new experiences, more narcissistic and more extroverted than the same persons in photos taken by others. In addition, gender differences were observed in the perception of pictures. Male profile owners were rated as more narcissistic and less trustworthy than female profile owners, but there was no significant interaction effect of type of picture and gender. Moreover, a mediation analysis of presumed motives for posting selfies revealed that negative evaluations of selfie posting individuals were mainly driven by the perceived motivation of impression management. Findings suggest that selfies are likely to be evaluated less positively than producers of selfies might suppose.

Sexiness on Social Media

Using an experimental methodology, the present study assessed college men’s perceptions of a female peer who presented herself on Facebook in either a sexualized or nonsexualized manner. One hundred and seventeen college men viewed a Facebook profile with either a sexualized profile photo or a nonsexualized profile photo of a young woman and then evaluated the profile owner. They also reported on their dating attitudes. Results indicated that the sexualized profile owner was considered less physically attractive, less socially appealing, and less competent to complete tasks. Interest in dating and casual sex with the profile owner as well as general dating attitudes were largely not impacted by the type of profile photo. Findings suggest that using a sexualized profile photo on Facebook comes with some relational costs for young women. Strategies for educating young people about new media use and sexualization are discussed.

Facebook and people's state self-esteem: The impact of the number of other users' Facebook friends

The present two experimental studies examined the extent to which upward and downward comparison processes on Facebook influence people's state self-esteem. Participants were exposed to mock-up Facebook profiles of female and male targets with many or few Facebook friends. Participant sex was also included in the experimental design. In Study 1, a 2 (number of Facebook friends) × 2 (profile owner sex) × 2 (participant sex) experimental design was employed. Unexpectedly, the manipulation had no significant impact on people's state self-esteem. In Study 2, it was examined whether there would be a curvilinear relationship between the number of other's Facebook friends and participant's self-esteem, in that exposure to others with many or few Facebook friends increases self-esteem compared to others with a moderate number of Facebook friends. Hence, Study 2 employed a 3 (number of Facebook friends) × 2 (profile owner sex) × 2 (participant sex) between-participants experimental design. However, there was neither a linear nor a curvilinear impact of the number of other's Facebook friends on participant's level of state self-esteem. Both studies also revealed that the effects were not more pronounced when participants were exposed to same-sex rather than other-sex Facebook profiles.

Marfan syndrome patient experiences as ascertained through postings on social media sites.

Marfan syndrome (MS) is a connective tissue disorder that affects thousands of adolescents [Population Reference Bureau, 2013]. Some adolescent patients with MS may use social media to express their experiences and emotions, but little is known about what patients choose to share online. To investigate social media content related to Marfan syndrome we used search terms "Marfan syndrome" and "Marfans" on six different social media sites. The top five recent and popular posts for each site were collected and coded weekly for five weeks. Posts were excluded if they were reshared content or not in English. A codebook was developed using an iterative process to categorize posts and comments. Out of 300 posts collected 147 posts (49.0%) were included for evaluation. Categories of displayed content included personal pictures, memes and pictures featuring symptoms of MS (41.5%) and personal MS experiences (27.1% of posts). One quarter of the posts specifically mentioned a positive experience or how thankful the profile owner was for their life. A unique category of posts (13.7%) referenced Austin Carlile, a celebrity singer with MS, as a role model. Physicians and healthcare providers may consider using social media to understand common MS concerns and to place future health education materials.

Individuals’ perception of others’ self-esteem, psychological well-being and attractiveness: Role of body size and peers’ comments among Japanese and Americans

From a cross-cultural perspective, this study investigates how individuals form impressions of others’ self-esteem, psychological well-being, and physical attractiveness as a function of others’ body size as well as messages these others receive from their peers. Mock-up Facebook profile pages in which the body size of the profile owner (thin vs. overweight) and peer-generated messages (accepting vs. thin-encouraging) were manipulated in the study. After viewing a Facebook profile page online, American and Japanese females completed a questionnaire. Japanese, but not Americans, (a) believed a profile owner who received thin-promoting messages to have higher psychological well-being than a profile owner who received accepting messages, (b) assumed an overweight profile owner to have lower self-esteem than a thin profile owner, and (c) perceived a thin profile owner as more physically attractive than an overweight profile owner.

Social Comparison, Envy, and Depression on Facebook: A Study Looking at the Effects of High Comparison Standards on Depressed Individuals

The co-occurrence of depression and envy is both plausible and empirically established. However, little is known about the mechanisms underlying this correlation. An account is proposed according to which low self-esteem in depressed individuals leads to upward social comparison and thus makes envy more likely. This effect should frequently occur in online social networks like Facebook because they allow for easy impression management and hence provide high comparison standards. In a quasi-experimental online study, depressed and nondepressed participants indicated their self-esteem and were then presented with specifically set up Facebook profiles that were either attractive or unattractive. Participants were asked to compare themselves to the profile owner and to report their resulting feelings of inferiority and envy. Depressed participants were more envious, especially after seeing the attractive profile. Envy was associated with higher self-reported inferiority and also correlated negatively with self-esteem. The connection between depression and envy is demonstrated with an experimental elicitation of envy for the first time. The results strongly suggest that low self-esteem and consequent feelings of inferiority play a crucial role in depressed individuals' elevated levels of envy. Practical implications and limitations are discussed.

A Framework for Detecting Cloning Attacks in OSN Based on a Novel Social Graph Topology

Online Social Networks (OSN) are considering one of the most popular internet applications which attract millions of users around the world to build several social relationships. Emerging the Web 2.0 technology allowed OSN users to create, share, or exchange types of contents in a popular fashion. The other hand, OSN are considering one of the most popular platforms for the intruders to spread several types of OSN attacks. Creating fake profiles for launching cloning attacks is one of the most risky attacks which target Users' profiles in Online Social Networks, the attacker seek to impersonate user's identity through duplicating user's online presence in the same or across several social networks, therefore, he can deceive OSN users into forming trusting social relations with his created fake profiles. These malicious profiles aim to harvest sensitive user's information or misuse the reputation of the legitimate profile's owner, as well as it may be used as a spy profiles for other criminal parties. Detecting these fake profiles still represent a major problem from OSN Security and Privacy point of view. In this paper we introduced a theoretical framework which depends on a novel topology of a social graph called Trusted Social Graph (TSG) which used to visualize trusted instances of social communications between OSN users. Another contribution is a proposed detection model that based on TSG topology as well as two techniques; Deterministic Finite Automaton (DFA) and Regular Expression. Our proposed detection model used to recognize the stranger instances of communications and social actions that performed using fake profiles in OSN.

Nonverbal Decoding on Facebook: Applying the IPT-15 and the SSI to Personality Judgments

This study uses the lens model paradigm to explore whether two interpersonal sensitivity tests [i.e., Interpersonal Perception Task (IPT-15), Social Skills Inventory (SSI)] are associated with the accuracy of personality judgments made from Facebook (FB) profile pages. Target participants’ (N = 100) personality, self-monitoring, and FB honesty were self-reported, and the FB profile of each target was downloaded. Observers (N = 35) completed the IPT-15 and SSI and then estimated each profile owner’s personality from the profile pages. Observers’ scores on the IPT-15 were positively associated with the accuracy of estimates of targets’ extraversion and neuroticism. Observers’ SSI-ES scores were positively associated with the accuracy of estimates of targets’ agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness. Characteristics of targets, such as self-monitoring, FB honesty, and overall FB use, also affected the accuracy of estimates. Results demonstrate that offline measures of sensitivity are associated with the accuracy of online personality judgments.

When Sharing Less Means More: How Gender Moderates the Impact of Quantity of Information Shared in a Social Network Profile on Profile Viewers' Intentions About Socialization

This study summarizes the results from a 2 (low vs. high information) × 2 (female vs. male profile) experiment that investigates the impact of quantity of information shared on a Social Network Site (SNS) profile on viewers’ intentions to pursue further interactions with the profile owner. Quantity of information had no statistically significant effect on intentions to further socialize online. The two-way interaction between information quantity and profile gender was such that for male profiles more information increased profile viewers’ intentions to further socialize with the profile owner, whereas for female profiles the opposite was the case. The three-way interactions among quantity of information, profile gender, and profile viewer's gender underline a tendency for male profile viewers to respond more positively to higher information shared by profiles from their own gender. For female viewers, this effect, although in the same direction, was smaller.

Filtering Dirty Words in Online Social Network by Applying Automated Filtering System

The aim of the project work is automatically to filter the dirty words from other users without displaying to the profile owner. In Online Social Network may have possibilities of posting some dirty messages so it need to filter without displaying to owner. It has achieved by using Rule based Filtering System. The Rule Based Filtering System allows users customize to filter the noisy or dirty words by applying some filtering Criteria. It exploits Machine Learning (ML). Machine Learning is a text categorization techniques to specify some categories for assign the short text dirty words based on their content. The content-based filtering on messages posted on user space has specified the additional challenges to be given the short length of these messages. Online social networks not only make it easier for users to share their opinions with each other, but also serve as a platform for developing filter algorithms.

Young Adolescents' Sexual and Romantic Reference Displays on Facebook

PurposeSocial networking sites (SNSs) form increasingly popular venues for adolescents to express their developing identity, including their sexual self. This study investigated how and to what extent early and middle adolescents display sexuality and romance on SNSs and the demographic and psychosexual factors associated with their displays. MethodsDutch adolescents aged 11–18 years were recruited and Facebook friended. Participants' Facebook profiles were evaluated for sexual and romantic references and Facebook engagement. Participants completed a digital questionnaire measuring constructs related to romantic and sexual development. Analyses included chi-square and Student's t-tests. ResultsA total of 104 adolescents (Mage = 15.01, 68.3% female) were Facebook friended. Of 104 profiles, 25 (24.0%) contained 67 sexual references, and 27 (26.0%) contained 204 romantic references. Sexual references were mostly posted by others and referring to others or to no one in particular, whereas romantic references were predominantly posted by and referring to the profile owner. Displayers of sexual and romantic references were, compared with nondisplayers, older, more engaged in Facebook, more sexually experienced, and perceived more of their peers as approving of sex and as sexually active. In addition, sexual displayers were more likely boys and more sexually interested. There were no differences with respect to sexual intention and sexual attitudes. ConclusionsA minority of young adolescents display sexual and romantic references on SNSs. References may reflect adolescents' offline sexual and romantic experiences. Yet, they may be powerful in creating behavioral norms; therefore, guidance on interpreting and displaying such messages should be promoted.

Facebook as a third author—(Semi-)automated participation framework in Social Network Sites

Questioning the transparent construction of emerging Web 2.0 discourse communities, this article asks in what ways structural options and restrictions of the software service ‘Facebook’ offer new semiotic resources and set up (novel) conditions for participation. More specifically, it holds that the medium in use and the particular software service acts as a kind of third author: The electronic environment and its functional properties facilitate and delimit a variety of discourse patterns and thus intervene in the communication between profile owner and profile recipients.To assess the impact of the electronic environment on user participation within Facebook, the present article will first introduce the notion of (technological) affordances and discuss characteristic ‘action possibilities’ that are typically offered by Social Network Sites. It will then give background information on general features of participation in online environments and identify key functions of the Facebook environment. On the basis of these findings, the article will discuss how Facebook's communicative properties enable and constrain textual practices and social interaction (functional affordances). Data from actual Facebook members give weight to how individuals adapt in different ways to software-biased action possibilities (relational affordances).

“It’s Not Who You Know, but Who You Add:” An investigation into the differential impact of friend adding and self-disclosure on interpersonal perceptions on Facebook

This research seeks to understand how people perceive and respond to structural factors and different types of disclosure on Facebook when evaluating the profile of someone they have never met offline. Using a 2×3×2 between-subjects experimental design, this research explored the relationship between friend adding (add; no add), levels of self-disclosure (low, medium, high), and sex of the Facebook profile owner (male; female) on feelings of interpersonal liking, future behavioral intentions to interact, and homophily. Results indicated that friend adding and higher levels of self-disclosure led to greater feelings of interpersonal liking and homophily amongst both male and female participants. In addition, males tended to view other male profiles with moderate amounts of disclosure and female profiles with the highest amount of disclosure most favorably. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

Privacy-aware electronic society

Our electronic society is making fast progress for offering users greater comfort in their daily activities. Users can benefit from fast access to services; better reactivity of their physical, computing, and networking environments to their own needs and habits; and preselection of information flows and relationships in which they are interested. Our digital society is eager to collect and analyze information for serving users as best as possible. Profiling users is a usual marketing activity, but new lucrative applications exploiting the huge amount of available information are emerging. The trend of Big Data has been accompanied by concerns regarding the aggregation, dissemination, and re-identification of personal identifiable information. This special issue contributes to address these privacy issues, proposing privacy-enhancing technologies and solutions suited to the today’s electronic society. The majority of the selected papers in this issue propose techniques and/or models for supporting privacy preferences and privacy-aware access control. The special issue also includes a contribution illustrating how the web browsing history can uniquely identify users for profiling purpose. Finally, there is a usercentered study discussing how much privacy people are willing to lose in order to gain some utilities. Collectively, these papers consider diverse contexts, ranging from social networks and web browsing to medical/social environments and Internet of Things (IoT). Said Oulmakhzoune, Nora Cuppens-Boulahia, Frederic Cuppens, Stephane Morucci, Mahmoud Barhamgi, and Djamal Benslimane propose a lightweight vocabulary for the fine-grained definition of privacy preferences in the paper titled “Privacy Query Rewriting Algorithm Instrumented by a Privacy-Aware Access Control Model.” Data owners express their privacy requirements through the PrivOrBAC privacy-aware model, in terms of restrictions on consent, accuracy, purpose, and recipients. SPARQL queries submitted by users are then rewritten in such a way that the query results comply with data owners’ privacy preferences. This rewriting process exploits PrivOrBAC privacy-aware model by decomposing SPARQL queries into a set of PrivOrBAC web services representing privacy preferences that must be satisfied. An interesting use case is also illustrated, showing the applicability of the approach in a healthcare scenario. The paper “PriMa: A Comprehensive Approach to Privacy Protection in Social Network Sites” by Anna Squicciarini, Federica Paci, and Smitha Sundareswaran, proposes a privacy protection mechanism for social network (SN) users named “Privacy Manager” (PriMa). PriMa helps users, through dynamically generated access rules, to preserve the privacy of their traits, that is, their pieces of information exposed to other SN users. The rules are generated based on three criteria as follows: (1) the level of accessibility of the user’s traits, (2) the profile of the owner’s privacy preference for the specific trait or for the trait’s category, and (3) the risks of unwanted or uncontrolled leakage of traits resulting from connected users who are eligible to access the profile owner’s traits. PriMa is implemented and the performance evaluation demonstrates that access rule generation takes reasonable time less than 0.7 ms for 150 traits and 260 users. The paper “Improving the User Content Privacy on Social Networks Using Rights Management Systems,” by Joaquim Marques and Carlos Serrao, aims at protecting users’ privacy in SNs. To overcome privacy issues arising when users share M. Laurent (*) Telecom SudParis, Evry, France e-mail: maryline.laurent@telecom-sudparis.eu

Effects of witnessing fat talk on body satisfaction and psychological well-being: A cross-cultural comparison of Korea and the United States

We examined how witnessing fat talk on Facebook influenced the body satisfaction and psychological well-being of Korean and U.S. young women. Korean (n = 137) and U.S. (n = 159) women completed an online questionnaire after viewing a randomly assigned mock-up Facebook page where body size of the profile owner and the messages from her peers were manipulated. Findings showed that (a) Koreans witnessing an underweight peer's fat talk reported lower body satisfaction than did those witnessing an overweight peer's fat talk, but the peer's body size did not affect the U.S. women, and (b) Koreans witnessing messages discouraging weight loss reported greater psychological well-being than did those witnessing messages promoting weight loss, whereas peers' comments did not influence the U.S. women.

Impression management and formation on Facebook: A lens model approach

To extend research on online impression formation and warranting theory, the present investigation reports a Brunswick lens model analysis of Facebook profiles. Facebook users’ ( n = 100) personality (i.e. extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, openness) was self-reported. Facebook users’ profiles were then content analyzed for the presence and rate of 53 cues. Observers ( n = 35), who were strangers to profile owners, estimated profile owner personality. Results indicate that observers could accurately estimate profile owners’ extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. For all personality traits except neuroticism, unique profile cues were diagnostic warrants of personality (i.e. indicative of profile owner personality and used to estimate personality by strangers). The results are discussed in relation to warranting theory, impression formation, and lens model research.

C2M: Open and Decentralized Cloud Contact Management

The task of allowing people to easily synchronize contact details of acquaintances between different devices and applications over the Internet has led to the rise of cloud-based address repositories, where users can synchronize the local contact database of a device or application with a central server. Anyhow, such systems requires each user to maintain a distinct contact database on his own, resulting in multiple copies of each person's contact information. As these copies need to be manually maintained, typographical errors and outdated data records are hard to be found or deleted, which is why constant maintenance effort is required in order to stay up to date. These issues have been addressed by cloud-based contact management systems such as Cloudtact, which allow users to store one's contact details on a central server, which is then used to share the user profiles with other users of the same service. Although systems like Cloudtact update probably outdated or erroneous information by synchronizing with the owner's profile, their users are forced to entrust their data to the respective system's operator, thus creating a lock-in effect that disallows other systems to synchronize contact information. To overcome this problem and to promote a heterogeneous ecosystem without any lock-in effects, we propose Cloud Contact Management (C2M), an open and decentralized profile management system that facilitates its users to host their own profile information on arbitrary federated servers. Therefore, contact details are only stored at one single location and controlled and maintained solely by the respective owner. Clients may be synchronized in order to stay up to date, while the profile owner may grant or deny access to his data on an individual, fine grained level. The proposed protocol is based on HTTPS and employs JSON to exchange data.

Where the Gates Matter Less: Ethnicity and Perceived Source Credibility in Social Media Health Messages

Research indicates that minority populations—who have a greater tendency to mistrust health information unless it's delivered through interpersonal contacts—are using social media as a means of health-related information seeking. The current study examines how individuals make credibility judgments about health-related information from social media sites. Specifically, reposts of health information on social media were examined. A 2 × 2 experimental design tested the relationship between the race of the person reposting the health information and respondents’ race on perceptions of credibility. Results found differences in perceived credibility based on both the race of the profile owner and race of judge. Moreover, these results suggest that the source of the social media user-generated cue has an effect in the credibility of reposting of health-related information. Implications of these findings are discussed.

Effects of Gender and Physical Attractiveness on Visual Attention to Facebook Profiles

The current study examined viewers' gaze while observing Facebook profiles of strangers varying in gender and physical attractiveness. Fifty-one participants viewed four Facebook profiles, a physically attractive and unattractive individual of each gender. Participants' eye movements were tracked as they viewed each profile for 60 seconds. Results showed that participants paid more attention to the physical appearance (main profile photograph) of female than of male profile owners and to the personal information (likes and interests) of male than to female profile owners. Participants spent more time focusing on information that was irrelevant to forming an impression of the profile owner (advertisements) when viewing the profiles of unattractive than attractive individuals, suggesting that they made a greater effort to learn about these individuals.