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The post that wasn't: exploring self-censorship on facebook

Published: 23 February 2013 Publication History

Abstract

Social networking site users must decide what content to share and with whom. Many social networks, including Facebook, provide tools that allow users to selectively share content or block people from viewing content. However, sometimes instead of targeting a particular audience, users will self-censor, or choose not to share. We report the results from an 18-participant user study designed to explore self-censorship behavior as well as the subset of unshared content participants would have potentially shared if they could have specifically targeted desired audiences. We asked participants to report all content they thought about sharing but decided not to share on Facebook and interviewed participants about why they made sharing decisions and with whom they would have liked to have shared or not shared. Participants reported that they would have shared approximately half the unshared content if they had been able to exactly target their desired audiences.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CSCW '13: Proceedings of the 2013 conference on Computer supported cooperative work
    February 2013
    1594 pages
    ISBN:9781450313315
    DOI:10.1145/2441776
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 23 February 2013

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    Author Tags

    1. privacy
    2. self-censorship
    3. social networking sites
    4. usability

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    CSCW '13: Computer Supported Cooperative Work
    February 23 - 27, 2013
    Texas, San Antonio, USA

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    • (2024)The Hidden Toll of Instant Messaging Use in Remote Work: Interaction Dynamics Between Subordinates and SupervisorsProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642913(1-15)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
    • (2024)What to the Muslim is Internet search: Digital Borders as Barriers to InformationProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642770(1-17)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
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