Understanding privacy switching behaviour on Twitter

Dilara Kekulluoglu, Kami Vaniea, Walid Magdy

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

Changing a Twitter account’s privacy setting between public and protected changes the visibility of past tweets. By inspecting the privacy setting of more than 100K Twitter users over 3 months, we noticed that over 40% of those users changed their privacy setting at least once with around 16% changing it over 5 times. This observation motivated us to explore the reasons why people switch their privacy settings. We studied these switching phenomena quantitatively by comparing the tweeting behaviour of users when public vs protected, and qualitatively using two follow-up surveys (n=100, n=324) to understand potential reasoning behind the observed behaviours. Our quantitative analysis shows that users who switch privacy settings mention others and share hashtags more when their setting is public. Our surveys highlighted that users turn protected to share personal content and regulate boundaries while they turn public to interact with others in ways the protected setting prevents.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
EditorsSimone Barbosa, Cliff Lampe, Caroline Appert, David A. Shamma, Steven Drucker, Julie Williamson, Koji Yatani
Place of PublicationNew York, NY, USA
PublisherACM
Pages1-14
Number of pages14
ISBN (Print)9781450391573
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 28 Apr 2022
EventThe ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - New Orleans Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, New Orleans, United States
Duration: 30 Apr 20225 May 2022
https://chi2022.acm.org/

Publication series

NameProceedings of Human Factors in Computing Systems
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
ISSN (Print)1062-9432

Conference

ConferenceThe ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Abbreviated titleCHI 2022
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityNew Orleans
Period30/04/225/05/22
Internet address

Keywords / Materials (for Non-textual outputs)

  • privacy
  • Twitter
  • security
  • online social networks
  • privacy settings

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