# Risk Perceptions on Social Media Use in Norway
## 5 Analysis and Results
### Risk Perceptions
#### 5.2.1 Risk Perceptions on Social Media Posting  
We asked the respondents about how they perceived risk when they posted various types of information on their social media accounts using the following rating scale: _1--Very low, 2--Low, 3--High_ and 4--Very High. Table 15 illustrates the results for all activities and platforms. The X-axis shows the count and percentage per answer per service. The right-hand side of the table shows a summary results in the form the mean for comparison. The _total average for topic_-line is the average of all the SoMe platforms for a topic for comparison of the total. The results show that very few think posting images is a high-risk endeavour, all four services have a median of _2--Low_. Unsurprisingly, sharing photos on Snapchat is perceived to have the lowest risk being primarily a picture sharing service. Both Reddit and Snapchat have about 20% more respondents perceiving the risk of posting images as very low. An example that has been seen is people having their houses broken into while on holiday, while it is uncertain that thieves use open sources to find victims or not, the threat is there and easily visible. We therefore attempted to gauge how people perceive the risks that can come from posting about a holiday on social media. As we can see from the figure, the perceived risk goes higher with the highest perceived risk from Twitter users, where they placed about 60% as high or very high. Reddit and Snapchat seem to have a lower perceived risk than Facebook and Twitter; this might stem from the more direct form of interaction with Snapchat and the more anonymous interaction with on Reddit. Furthermore, pet names is a piece of information often used in security questions and we attempted to gauge how people perceive the risk of posting about something that very likely could show up as a security question on one of the services that they use. The results in Table 15 show that the Reddit and Twitter participants had the highest average with 25-27% perceiving the risk as high or very high. The interesting part about this question is that it could be a security question that someone in a household uses. Even though the risk of compromise may be limited for the person posting such information on social media, it may be the answer to a security question of another person from the same household. Another common activity on SoMe is to share content that the poster thinks is funny. The perceived risk of posting or sharing something humorous is highest on Twitter where 11% rate it as high and 2% at very high. Both Snapchat and Reddit have their very low perceived risk at around 50%. \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{l l l l l l l l l l} \hline \hline  & & \multicolumn{2}{c}{**Facebook**} & \multicolumn{2}{c}{**Twitter**} & \multicolumn{2}{c}{**Reddit**} & \multicolumn{2}{c}{**Snapchat**} \\ \hline  & & **No** & **Yes** & **No** & **Yes** & **No** & **Yes** & **No** & **Yes** \\ \hline DigitalNative & Native & 29 & 168 & 113 & 84 & 62 & 135 (78) & 25 & 172 \\  & Non-native & 12 & 120 & 82 & 50 & 78 & 54 (29) & 37 & 95 \\ \hline Sex & Male & 38 & 187 & 124 & 101 & 61 & 164 (94) & 53 & 172 \\  & Female & 2 & 97 & 70 & 29 & 78 & 21 (11) & 8 & 91 \\  & No answer & 1 & 4 & 1 & 4 & 1 & 4 (2) & 1 & 4 \\ \hline Hacked & Yes & 10 & 40 & 33 & 17 & 30 & 20 (13) & 12 & 38 \\ account & No & 31 & 248 & 162 & 117 & 110 & 169 (94) & 50 & 229 \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 14: Overview of categories distributed on the use of services. A common activity on SoMe is to share a news story with or without a comment. Table 15 shows how people perceive risk when sharing this information. Here, the combined high and very high comes to about 19% at the most (Twitter); this shows that very few people perceive the risk of sharing or posting news as high or very high. Between 52 and 59% rate the risk as low on Twitter and Facebook, 39% for Reddit and 47% for Snapchat, which is also the average and median. Between 48 and 53% perceive the risk as very low on Snapchat and Reddit.