By: Emily Brosky
When thinking of security on social media, what is the first thing that comes to our minds? Passwords. Using such easy and harmless acts such as these can create a widespread phenomenon of privacy concerns when dealing with social media engagement and how it can cause the engagement to decrease. Things such as hacking accounts, sharing locations, identity theft, data exposures, and access restrictions are all areas of where security on social media plays a part on the media; however, they don’t always satisfy their jobs completely.
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When carrying a social media platform and increasing engagement with it, can cause security risks to increase based on the information the audience must give in order to access your content or see certain pictures or links you provide in your blog, article, or website.
According to the study “Should I Post or Ghost?”: Examining how privacy concerns impact social media engagement in US Consumers,” written by Laura F. Bright, Hayoung Sally Lim, and Kelty Logan, listed to go along with this blog, they describe privacy concerns as being negative towards social media engagement. They describe that users for these platforms must have “privacy protection barriers, social media trust, and social media fatigue” in order to fully get the wear out of the social media platforms they use. Using terms such as social media fatigue can cause confusion when dealing with social media.
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Social media fatigue can be defined as the user’s tendency to pull back from social media after being bombarded with too many social media platforms and followers, which can become a lot when trying to maintain this specific social life.
The study included with this blog is a study that also conducted an online survey with a total of 760 U.S. social media consumers to test the relationships between privacy concerns and the social media engagement affected by it. The results from this online survey revealed that when users or the audience have a highly trusted relationship with a platform, social media engagement will increase without thinking of the concerns that need to be resolved by privacy precautions.
When using social media platforms that require privacy, it is easy to blame the audience or users who view these forms of content that need to be accessed a certain way; however, according to this study and other forms of research, the creator of the content should ensure data privacy, and non-surveillance using materials.
When having massive storage of data, and personal information available to hacking and scraping within a platform, using things such as access restrictions for influencers’ resources or content can create a barrier to stop the process a little better. Having this advantage still does not guarantee the thrill of keeping all your personal information safe and secure.
Returning back to the study provided, they talk about a term called “privacy paradox,” which is the way a user online will choose to protect themselves and their information online versus the way they actually behave online, and what extent they go to protect their private information. Using examples such as, someone giving away the value of their password for the worth of a piece of candy truly shows the pedestal users put social media on for the cost of their identities, and information.
About 69% of American adults have now brought themselves on some kind of social media platform, which includes 35% of that group 65 and older. (Rainie, 2018) As users become more frequent, it is getting harder and harder to protect the data that comes with them; the biggest age group who use social media the most are teenagers. Teenagers use social media the most when using communicating with their friends, whereas the older generations use it for facts and answers to their questions, such as health facts, political, and scientific information.
Now, in order to end, we must leave thinking with these thoughts: is using extended versions of social media worth our personal information and everything we’ve worked for? What can we do to ensure more safety precautions are happening online? Let’s reward ourselves by paying attention to hazards such as hackers or scrapers and figuring out if certain things are a must or a bust.
More resources must be made in order to prevent this issue, and slowly it can become quite preventable for online users.