x Comparing privacy concerns of online media users across social media platforms between American and Thai individuals
By: Megan Resurreccion
Tags: America And Thailand, Final Report, Project, Privacy, Social Media

This final set of content mining plots for open ended responses is for the question, “Explain what you would do if you found out you were being stalked online (Facebook + Instagram).” On the American side of the data, these tokens were the most common: ‘private’ [occurring 19 times], ‘would’ [occurring 18 times], ‘account’ [occurring 13 times], and ‘make’ [occurring 11 times]. On the Thai side of the data, these tokens were the most common: ‘private’ [occurring 66 times], ‘setting’ [occurring 62 times], ‘adjust’ [occurring 60 times], ‘privacy’ [evidently similar to ‘private’; occurring 60 times], and ‘post’ [occurring 37 times]. It is safe to say that in the least that both American and Thai people would consider deleting their accounts and potentially make a new one.

Notable Comments and Responses

Some of the responses and comments received provided some extra context as to what users think, so we’ve selected several of them that were unique and/or important to note. [A few of these responses were shortened.] We find that as a whole within these comments that there are two perspectives when it comes to social media and privacy: believing everyone should be careful of what they post (i.e. if there’s information you don’t want public, then you don’t post it) and believing using platforms such as Facebook and Instagram is something to be cautious about (i.e. the usage of social media may in of itself threaten your privacy).

Do you have any other comments on Facebook, Instagram, or social media in general? [American]

Social media damages society. I work with Gen Z kids for a living and they are beyond f***ed up. It’s crazy to see how Instagram culture has infected them and changed them. I feel so sorry for the next generation. [Female, 25–34]

Facebook and [Instagram] are actively hostile to user privacy and cannot be trusted. [Female, 35–44]

To me it’s not a big deal that it’s not private — I just don’t post anything that I wouldn’t want strangers to see [Female, 18–24]

I really do not have that much idea how privacy works on social media. I always thought if you want to keep your life private do not post it on the internet. [Female, 18–24]

Do you have any other comments on Facebook, Instagram, or social media in general? [Thai]

it’s everyone’s responsibility to be cautious of what you post [Female, 35–44]

Facebook and IG accounts have different privacy specifics. I have more confidence in IG’s privacy than Facebook, as IG accounts limit access to my information if I’m not accepted the following request, while Facebook’s access to information can include Subscribing, viewing posted photos, viewing tagged posts or photos, and checking in places makes privacy information leaked or misused, likely from Facebook rather than IG. [Male, 25–34]

adjusting the profile privacy does not solve cybercriminal issues, so we should not post private data on social media. [Female, 45–54]

I feel threatened by Facebook [Male, 35–44]

What We Learned

Kantida: I learned that social media has become a necessary daily activity as over 60% of our respondents occasionally post on social media such as Facebook and Instagram. Moreover, 10% and 25% of them post on social media daily and weekly respectively. The popular social media platform in our study is Facebook compared to Instagram. According to our results, American respondents have more average followers on Instagram, whereas Thai respondents have more average friends on Facebook. This might tell us that Thais use Facebook more frequently than Instagram. I also noticed that the majority of our respondents were aware of privacy concerns on social media since both American and Thai respondents feel their Instagram is not private overall. Moreover, most of them think they don’t understand Facebook’s privacy policy. Another thing I noticed, the majority of American respondents deleted their posts, comments, and shares on Facebook because they felt it was embarrassing, compared to Thai respondents who deleted their posts, comments, and shares when they felt it was inappropriate. These are proof that social media users, both Americans and Thais are concerned about what they published on social media for various reasons. However, having different age groups involved in this study would give a different perspective on how different ages have a different concern on social media privacy as I noticed that the majority of our respondents are between the ages of 25–34. Thus, the results of this study might reflect the social media privacy concern insight mostly based on users in this range of ages.

Megan: One of the first things I learned while conducting this research was that survey work was more difficult than expected. But on the other hand, I realized I enjoyed this qualitative type of work as well. I think it’s interesting to investigate what people are thinking in the here and now. Our world is always changing and evolving and as a result, people’s opinions will change and evolve, too. To make sure people continued to stay informed on what’s happening in the world, including the digital one, studies like this, I believe, are necessary to conduct. Additionally, what surprised me about this study is some of the comments people provided at the end and just how people felt in general. Regardless of nationality, there are reservations about putting your personal information out into the internet because of how platforms handle these issues. One person said they “feel threatened” by Facebook. Another says “social media damages society.” I personally feel that you do have some control over what kind of information about you is out there on the internet, but am aware that privacy is still an issue that social media platforms need to continually address as our lives become more and more public. Sometimes it seems the only way to keep your information private is to keep off social media entirely, but this isn’t always possible in this day and age. Despite the literature, there weren’t any glaring differences between the American and Thai data except when more Thai users responded they have a moderate understanding of Instagram’s privacy policy as opposed to American users who only had a little bit of understanding of Facebook’s privacy policy.

Limitations

We have encountered that inviting people to take your survey is difficult without an incentive. If we did this again in the future, we would need an incentive to further gain more responses and feedback. Having more respondents in this study will be helpful because there is a stronger representation of social media privacy habits and trends. This increase in survey participants would give more concrete and measurable results. Also having different age groups involved in this study would give a different perspective on how different ages have a different concern on social media privacy. We would have liked a better balance of participants as opposed to there being primarily one gender or one age group that answered the survey. There still was a decent number of respondents to start out with were we to continue this project further, however. Additionally, everyone who did the survey responded to most of the questions but a shorter survey might be better. Several of the survey questions also are more opinionated and may have bias such as when respondents were asked how public or private they consider their profiles or how well they think they understand Facebook’s or Instagram’s privacy policies.

Ethical Issues

It is clear that privacy is a genuine concern to many social media users and that many don’t understand privacy policies. Information privacy, or lack thereof, is an important topic in online media today. With scandals such as the one with Cambridge Analytica, it can be difficult to determine how safe our information on the internet is and if the sites holding information on our lives are to be trusted. Regardless of the ethics involved, analyzing the concerns of current users was the primary goal of this study.

Conclusions

According to the results in this study, we noticed that American respondents have more average followers on Instagram, whereas Thai respondents have more average friends on Facebook. The majority of American and Thai respondents were aware of privacy concerns on social media. Also, both American and Thai respondents feel their Instagram is not private overall. The majority of American respondents think they don’t understand Facebook’s privacy policy. Moreover, the majority of American respondents deleted their posts, comments, and shares on Facebook because they felt it was embarrassing, compared to Thai respondents who deleted their posts, comments, and shares when they felt it was inappropriate.

Furthermore, we didn’t find many discrepancies between how Americans and Thais use social media and feel about privacy on social media, surprisingly. But what this means is that there may be other social media users of other nationalities that feel the same way as our American and Thai respondents. This means that regardless of nationality or country, social media privacy is a concern wherever you are. It is important for social media platforms (not just Facebook and Instagram) to address these privacy issues and work with its users on how to better inform them of how their data being out there on the internet works and its consequences. We also need to just better understand privacy policies and educate ourselves on the digital issues at hand. Maybe it’s time to pull up those privacy policies and terms and conditions and read up on them for everyone’s sake.

Appendix

Due to there being essentially two datasets, we worked on data collecting and exploratory data analysis separately and discussed what we have found and developed later. Both Kantida and Megan came up with the idea and agreed on investigating privacy on social media platforms (specifically Facebook and Instagram) by conducting a survey. Kantida and Megan also worked together equally to write the Data Collection Report, Intermediate Report, and the Final Report of our findings.

Kantida’s Contributions: Throughout the semester, these were my contributions. I conducted the initial analysis on the Thai data (when writing an intermediate report for the class) in addition to collecting that data and helped look over all the visualization to ensure they were comprehensive and understandable.

Megan’s Contributions: During this project, my primary contributions were taking the lead on creating the Tableau visualizations and token content mining analysis. I also conducted the initial analysis on the American data (when writing an intermediate report for the class) in addition to collecting that side of the data.

References

[1] Billings, A. C., Broussard, R. M., Xu, Q., & Xu, M. (2019). Untangling International Sport Social Media Use: Contrasting U.S. and Chinese Uses and Gratifications Across Four Platforms. Communication & Sport, 7(5), 630–652. https://doi.org/10.1177/2167479518790014

[2] Cheng, Y.-S., & Liu, Y.-C. (2019). Contrasting the Motivations of Using Social Networking Sites between Western and Eastern Countries. Journal of Internet Technology, 20(6), 12. https://doi.org/10.3966/160792642019102006026

[3] Gil de Zúñiga, H., Diehl, T., Huber, B., & Liu, J. (2017). Personality Traits and Social Media Use in 20 Countries: How Personality Relates to Frequency of Social Media Use, Social Media News Use, and Social Media Use for Social Interaction. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, 20(9), 540–552. https://doi.org/10.1089/cyber.2017.0295