“Should I Post or Ghost?”: Examining how privacy concerns impact social media engagement in US consumers

Abstract

Privacy concerns and social media usage continue to increase in parallel for many online consumers. While researchers have suggested the negative impact of privacy concerns on social media engagement, it is also observable that privacy concerns do not prevent users from disclosing their personal information online while using social media, in other words a privacy paradox exists. Noting this interesting discrepancy, our research investigates various factors influencing the relationship between privacy concerns and social media engagement. Privacy related factors are examined along with social media constructs as potential moderators that would explain why privacy concerns do/do not affect social media engagement. To explore these relationships, an online survey was conducted with a total of 760 US social media consumers. Results determined that privacy concerns negatively influenced social media engagement to the extent that users have privacy protection behaviors, social media trust, and social media fatigue. Interestingly, when users have high trust on social media platforms, social media engagement is more likely to increase despite privacy concerns. To increase engagement from consumers on these platforms, brands should look to establish transparent interactions with consumers that ensure data privacy and limit data surveillance.

The personalization–privacy paradox at the nexus of social exchange and construal level theories

“…As social exchange theory proposes (Blau, 1964), disclosing personal information to get personalized recommendations represents a social exchange, and marketing exchanges represent an estimated 70% of the economic impact of the data‐driven economy (Deighton & Johnson, 2013). Yet these benefits are constrained by privacy concerns (Bright et al, 2021; Maseeh et al, 2021; Song et al, 2021), and consumers are skeptical about the benefits they receive in exchange for their personal profile data. These challenges create a personalization–privacy paradox (Awad & Krishnan, 2006; Cloarec, 2020; Sutanto et al, 2013).…”

Digital technologies and privacy: State of the art and research directions

“…Recent research on privacy in social media has added engagement to this equation (Mosteller & Poddar, 2017), which takes the form of posting photos, frequently logging in, and so on. Extending this stream of research, Bright et al (2021) show that consumers' privacy concerns are negatively related to their social media engagement. Using linguistic content analysis of tweets, Visentin et al (2021) show that words associated with privacy concerns in a tweet inhibited the virality of the tweet as measured by the number of retweets.…”

Words matter: How privacy concerns and conspiracy theories spread on twitter

“…In nowadays information age, retailers, manufacturers, service providers, and non‐profit organizations routinely collect and use detailed consumer information (Bright et al, 2021; Maseeh et al, 2021). These “vertical dynamics” of information, while providing valuable insights for institutions' commercial interests (Bazarova & Masur, 2020), have made privacy one of the most important ethical issues of our time (Pizzi & Scarpi, 2020; Plangger & Montecchi, 2020; Shilton & Greene, 2019).…”

“…In the nowadays data‐driven world, information disclosure is a fundamental part of the functioning of e‐commerce (Maseeh et al, 2021), social network services (Shibchurn & Yan, 2015), location‐based services (Zhao, Lu and Gupta, 2012) and mobile apps (Gu et al, 2017). One major consequence of consumers' privacy concerns is that they can obstacle the disclosure of information on these online environments (Bright et al, 2021).…”

“…However, social media represent not only relevant platforms for individuals to express themselves (Choi & Sung, 2018) but they have also created the conditions for the propagation of problematic contents (Di Domenico & Visentin, 2020). As social media platforms are subject to limited governmental oversight regarding the collection and usage of users' data, social media users' privacy concerns have dramatically increased over the last years (Bright et al, 2021). In addition, recent data breach scandals have exacerbated this phenomenon (Hinds et al, 2020).…”