# Risk Perceptions on Social Media Use in Norway
Are there differences in risk perceptions between genders? 4. Does having suffered ID or account theft change risk perceptions on sharing habits? 3. How does ID theft occur and what are the consequences? As detailed in the research questions above, the included SoMe platforms are Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and Snapchat. A brief description of these services is a follows (worldwide user estimateswere collected from Oberlo.com for October 2020): Facebook is a social media platform that offers the opportunity to mostly yet who may see things about you and who can see your posts. Some information are not private by default, like friends list and information about the account holder. Facebook has 2.7 billion users. Twitter is a micro-blogging service where everything that is posted there is public by default. How one connects on Twitter is by actively choosing to follow different people. Compared to Facebook, where both parties have to actively accept becoming friends, one can follow whoever they want on Twitter without them having to say yes or no. The platform has a character count maximum of 240 characters, to keep the posts (tweets) short. Twitter is estimated to have 340 million users worldwide. Reddit is a social media that is more anonymous by nature, while very few subscribers use their name on their Reddit profiles. Reddit is partitioned into different subreddits where people can come together as various parties interested in the same thing; for example, there are subreddits for cats, politics and games. With how Reddit is structured there is a risk for Echo chambers to be formed, where people of the same thought keep agreeing to each other. Reddit is estimated to have 430 million users. Finally, Snapchat is a picture sharing service, where images one sends also get deleted after a set amount of time, and after the recipient has viewed an image, it gets deleted. If the recipient takes a screenshot of the image that they receive, the sender of the message receives a notification. Snapchat is estimated to have 230 million users worldwide. A recent study by Studen Studen (2019) investigated social media as a cultural and economic phenomenon, exploring their expected future developments through an international two-stage Delphi study. The study indicates that enhanced interaction on platforms, as well as platform diversification is expected, promoting social media as the predominant news distributor, also increasing their societal and psychological impact. Our principal contribution is knowledge regarding the risk perceptions concerning ID theft using SoMe platforms, and how users perceive the risk of conducting certain activities on the surveyed platforms. Our paper outlines which information assets the participants deem worthy of protection and what they fear on SoMe. Our paper proposes a novel threat model for SoMe users derived from the results. Finally, we go in depth into how ID theft occurs, and the suffered and perceived consequences of suffering a security breach. We have structured the remainder of this article as follows: The following section presents related work focusing among others on the areas of risk perception, ID theft and social media. Section 2 presents the methods used for this study discussing the instrument and the processes used for recruitment, data collection and analysis. Section 3 presents the sample demographics and discusses the representativity of the sample. Furthermore, Section 4 contains the complete analysis of the results, separating them into three major categories, firstly referring to routines, then risk perception and finally, risk perception alterations after suffering identity theft. Section 5 summarises the results and discusses the research questions. Lastly, we present the conclusions, which provide key takeaways and close the paper. The conclusions also include research limitations, impacts and recommendations for future research.