Removing the Mask: Trust, Privacy and Self-protection in Closed, Female-focused Facebook Groups

ABSTRACT

Facebook groups are spaces where women form communities and share their lived experiences. These peer-created and peer-moderated groups have ‘closed’ security settings, indicating that interactions within the group are to be considered private. They attract membership from women who desire safe, ‘trusted’, gender-specific spaces, though as this article demonstrates, these perceived ‘safe spaces’ are often fraught with difficulties. This article considers Facebook groups as intimate spaces which traverse the public and private, potentially allowing women to remove the mask of motherhood and draw on ‘lay-expertise’ and support. Drawing on three studies of closed Facebook groups, for Australian ‘mum bloggers’ and readers, Australian Defence Force partners, and migrant mothers in Australia, this article considers women’s motivations for creating and participating in shielded online spaces, how expectations of privacy and safety in these spaces are created and maintained, and the consequences when these expectations are breached. Situating the groups in the context of societal surveillance of mothers, migrants and military families, and expectations of intensive social reproductive labour, the authors consider both the liberatory potential of the groups and their limitations as vehicles for social change.

KEYWORDS:

• Facebook
• social media
• online communities
• privacy
• motherhood
• military
• digital ethnography

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the reviewers and editors of this special issue for their generous engagement with this article. We would also like to acknowledge the organisers and participants of the Digital Intimacies 2019 conference, where we presented an earlier version of this article.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Murdoch University (Project No. 2015/181) and University of Western Australia (Project Reference Number RA/4/1/5535).

2 Central Queensland University Human Research Ethics Committee (Project H16/04-078) and Defence People Research - Low Risk Ethics Panel (Protocol 016/16).

3 University of Sydney Human Research Ethics Committee (Project 2015/724).

Additional information

Funding

The focus groups for Catherine Archer’s research were supported by St John of God Health Care in collaboration with Playgroup WA.

Notes on contributors

Catherine Archer

Catherine Archer is a researcher and senior lecturer specialising in social media and strategic communication at Murdoch University. Her current research interests include social media, particularly related to families and health, with a complementary focus on social media influencer relations and ethics, and the blurring of lines between media, marketing, public relations and communication.

Amy Johnson

Amy Johnson is a lecturer in Journalism and Public Relations. Her research focus is on Australian Defence Force families and social media. She is an advisor to the Australian Government’s Council for Women and Families United by Defence Service and provides advice to military command teams about supporting families.

Leah Williams Veazey

Leah Williams Veazey is a postdoctoral researcher at the Sydney Centre for Healthy Societies in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Sydney. Her research interests include migration, care, digital cultures, and health. She is the author of Migrant Mothers in the Digital Age: Emotion and Belonging in Migrant Maternal Online Communities (Routledge, 2021).