Hi everyone! I'm Dilara, PhD student at the University of Edinburgh
and this work is about understanding the privacy settings switching behavior on Twitter
We quantify this changing behavior shown by Twitter users and investigate the reasons
behind them. This research is conducted together with Kami Vaniea and Walid Magdy
People use social network platforms to connect with each other share various information and
observe others and interact with them. People can choose to only connect with specific
group of people or multiple social circles. When these social circles such as friends, family, and
colleagues are all on the same social network, it can be hard for users to control the flow of information.
Posts are usually permanent which can further complicate the protection of privacy.
Social network platforms provide private settings for users to overcome these privacy challenges.
Users can adjust a range of configurations including setting the audience of their posts,
regulating interactions, and changing the visibility of the information they share
and these settings are platform specific where some of them are highly granular like Facebook
where every post can be configured separately and some of them are simpler like Twitter where
settings are applied to the whole account.
Users mostly keep the default settings provided by the platforms
or employ a set-it-and-forget-it approach where they configure these settings once at the account creation.
However, there is also a group of people who actively utilize these
settings to manage the flow of their information.
There is a significant body of research around
how people use privacy settings on platforms like Facebook with highly granular settings
but not as much on platforms with simpler ones. In this work, we focus on Twitter where these
settings are simpler and we investigate the privacy settings switching behavior.
Twitter provides two account types to users: public, which is the default type, and protected.
Anyone can see the tweets by public accounts but tweets by the protected accounts can only be seen by
followers. Public accounts can be followed by anyone but to follow a protected account users
need to send a follow request and the protected account should approve this follow request.
Others can interact freely with public tweets by liking, replying, retweeting, and quote tweeting but for the
protected tweets only followers can like and reply. But no one can retweet or quote tweet these tweets.
Twitter's binary private settings apply to the whole account which means that the tweets
sent while protected can be seen by anyone if the user changes their account back to public.
Visibility of the tweets depends solely on the account type of the tweeter which means that if
a protected account replies to a non-follower the reply cannot be seen by this non-follower.
Hence users have to change their accounts type to public if they want to interact with a non-follower.
In a soon-to-be presented work, we found that there was a set of users who described themselves as not
protected or public but "sometimes protected". This signals that they changed their privacy settings at least more than once.
Hence, we decided to focus on these users and understand the reasons behind the changes.
To do so we conducted three studies. First one was a Twitter data collection to observe
the switching behavior. We collected 107k protected Twitter accounts randomly from the Twitter sample
by collecting mentioned users and observed their account type changes for three months.
We also compared their tweeting behavior between public and protected
In the next study we conducted an open text survey to curate a set of common switching reasons
by asking participants to describe a recent event where they changed their private settings on Twitter
and in the last study we asked our participants to select
all the reasons they changed their settings before to understand the prevalence of the switching
reasons which we created by the previous study and the prior literature.
We also asked our participants about their strategies to manage their boundaries and controlling the audience.
From our study one, Twitter data analysis, we found that nearly 40 percent of the protected users we observed
changed their privacy settings at least once in three months.
and more than ten percent changed ten plus times.
We found that users tweet more and mention others more when they are public.
However, they mention non-followers more in their non-usual setting.
This means that users who stay mostly protected mentioned non-followers when they are public.
But also users who stay mostly public mention non-followers when they are protected
which basically cannot be seen by the mentioned non-follower.
The most common set of reasons to turn public was to be able to interact with other accounts
through mentioning, replying, retweeting, and quote-tweeting.
And for those who are mostly protected interactions like these seem to be the main driver to change visibility.
Users turn protected to share personal content and regulate their boundaries.
For example to limit their tweets reach from family friends or strangers
They also turn protected to prevent interactions. Some users stated that they turn protected when
they are not logged in and unable to respond to interactions.
More than half of the participants indicated that they delete some or all of their tweets before changing their visibility to public.
Discreet control approaches like muting and soft-blocking were also used by many.
Soft-blocking is blocking and immediately unblocking someone to remove them from followers
which is currently added as a new feature on Twitter, but that was after our study was conducted.
Users also deactivate to stop all interactions from others followers or non-followers.
We recommend some design changes in our paper. Firstly we suggest visibility pinning
where tweets stay as the visibility they were set by the users. 0:06:11.494,1193:02:47.295 Second suggestion is paired accounts
where there is one public and one protected accounts used together.
Users are already doing this in ad hoc and it could be directly supported by Twitter.
Thirdly making some tweets time-based by letting users decide on the longevity of a tweet.
We see that half of our survey participants delete their tweets before going public
and that likely happens in our data set collected from Twitter too.
Stopping all the interactions without deactivating or opening interactions when a protected user
wants to reply or quote tweet a non-follower is another design suggestion we give.
Thank you for listening and these are the researchers and sponsors on this project and our labs.