Saving face on Facebook: privacy concerns, social benefits, and impression management

ABSTRACT

The nearly ubiquitous use of online social networks generally entails substantial personal disclosure and elicits significant privacy concerns. This research uses Social Exchange Theory and the impression management (IM) literature to examine how privacy concerns can be counterbalanced by the perceived social benefits afforded by a social network’s ability to support IM. We frame social network use as an attempt to engage in IM, and we highlight the importance of a social network’s IM affordances in predicting social benefits from, and disclosure through, a social network. We test our model with a sample of 244 Facebook users, finding support for the proposed relationships and yielding the following contributions. First, this research provides a novel positioning of perceived IM affordances as a primary driver of both perceived social benefits and IM disclosure propensity. Second, this research illuminates that trust in both the social network provider and social network peers influences privacy concerns, social benefits, and perceived IM affordances. Our theory has important implications for researchers and practitioners interested in privacy issues within social networks.

KEYWORDS:

• Impression management
• privacy
• social media
• social exchange theory
• trust

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this paper was published in the 2014 ICIS proceedings (Wilson, Proudfoot, and Valacich 2014). For this version: the research model has been expanded with additional relevant constructs and hypotheses; additional control variables were included in the model testing; the theoretical development has been expanded; the related literature brought up-to-date; and additional discussion of results and implications have been added.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.