﻿Hi. I am Renita Washburn an PhD student in the University of Central Florida’s Modeling
and Simulation program. Today I will present results from our study on bottom-up psychosocial
interventions for interdependent privacy and their effectiveness based on individual
and content differences. In particular, I will explain how the project tested the effectiveness
of three types of interventions in changing broader social norms about interdependent
privacy on social media. I’ll start with an overview of the research and method, to include
the intervention design and mixed analytical approach. Then move to results of quantitative
and qualitative analysis and end with a discussion of the implications of the findings.
First, what is an interdependent privacy violation? Interdependent privacy
(IDP) violations occur when people share SENSITIVE information about others without their consent.
Multimedia IDP violations are a common type that involves social media users sharing other
people’s photos or images online, which may include private information about others.
On social media, photos can reach unintended audiences and migrate across platforms as
they are shared and re-shared, such that the person depicted no longer has control over
their online image. Photos can also undergo ‘context collapse’ as they are modified or
taken out-of-context with accompanying text captions, such as with memes. IDP violations
can have a variety of personal and professional consequences, ranging from psychological distress,
harassment, job loss, stalking, and damaged interpersonal relationships.
Given the consequences of IDP violations, a great deal of research has examined nudges and
educational interventions to help users protect their own information online.
Little research has focused on ‘psychosocial’ interventions for IDP preservation. Psychosocial
interventions have the advantage of targeting change from the ‘bottom-up’ influencing change
at the source – the social media users. Bottom-up interventions empower communities to shift social
norms and values based on new shared beliefs. The research on ‘psychosocial’ interventions FOR
protecting one's own privacy has shown video interventions are effective for promoting
positive social behavior and internet usage and are easy to disseminate to large audiences.
However, the success of video interventions is ultimately driven by their content and the context
in which the interventions are applied. This framed our research questions… We investigated
the extent to which video interventions were effective in altering IDP-relevant
photo-sharing attitudes and behaviors compared to a control condition with no intervention. The
overarching research question was how psychosocial interventions can promote IDP preservation in
social media. We developed four sub-questions focused on how attitudes and sharing behaviors
changed based on photo content, individual ratings of the IDP seriousness and intervention type.
The study method: We compared four groups of participants: 1) Control group who did
not receive an intervention, 2) Concepts group who learned about the concept of IDP violations
or—as we termed it in the videos—‘privacy pirating,’ 3) Facts group who were provided
fabricated statistics about the prevalence and consequences of IDP violations (however receive
a debrief on the reason for deception), and 4) Narratives group who were shown two stories about
people negatively affected by IDP violations.
asked to rate how likely they were to share 68 photo-based memes. Participants responded using
a scale from Extremely unlikely to Extremely likely to share.
A Social Media Usage questionnaire included seven survey items developed to assess the participants’
social media photo sharing activity and number of social media accounts. The Intervention Response
An intervention response questionnaire measured participant ratings of intervention quality, knowledge and perceptions
about interpersonal privacy prevalence.
For results, we’ll begin with the first research question: To what extent do users’ IDP-relevant
photo-sharing attitudes change in response to the interventions? First, the interventions
were perceived as relatively equivalent in effectiveness Yet, the Narrative intervention
resulted in significantly higher ratings IDP being common, compared to facts or concept.
Given the three video intervention types were rated relatively similar in effectiveness by
participants, additional analyses were used to test if there was a net positive effect
of the interventions.
agreed the topic of IDP violations is important and needs more awareness
To answer research question 2, we investigated the degree to which participant’s decisions to
share photos of other people in social media differed based on intervention condition.
Intervention condition was however a non-significant predictor of sharing sharing likelihood.
the aim of the interventions was not necessarily to decrease all types of sharing equally. Instead,
it was considered potentially more feasible to decrease sharing of photos that have the
most potential to cause harm. Thus, we examined intervention effectiveness in
light of the content differences, specifically valence (positive or negative portrayal of the
photo subject in the meme). Meme valence had a significant main effect on sharing likelihood,
such that more positively valenced memes were more likely to be shared. Controlling
for valence resulted in a marginally significant main effect of condition,
where the concept and facts conditions resulted in a decrease of sharing likelihood.
Also, the likelihood of sharing was lower when photo targets were portrayed more negatively.
Next we studied the interaction between condition and self-reported IDP seriousness.
Our findings indicated that the narrative condition backfired to increase the desire
to share among those who do not believe IDP violations are a serious problem.
In addition to the primary research question, we engaged in an exploratory analysis of themes
found in participant feedback on ways to improve the learning experience.
Overall, all three interventions were well received by participants. Highlights from
participant feedback on intervention effectiveness were related to including more relatable stories
and examples of desirable user behavior), adjusting audio and visual quality and
expanding the training to include personal strategies for IDP violation prevention
Let’s have quick discussion of the findings and their implications. The concept intervention was
most effective in reducing the sharing of more negative images. An explanation for this is the
narrative stories and facts presented were too mild to compel changes in sharing behavior.
Additionally, our results suggest that social media users are receptive to general information
about IDP and responsive in changing some of their sharing behaviors. Furthermore, that there
are cases in which mere awareness of concepts is an important first step in bottom-up social change.
Notably, the interventions did not alter users’ ratings of IDP seriousness, nor did interventions
alter participant ratings regarding the need for more IDP precautions. One explanation is these
particular privacy preferences are not easily changed. For example, a person may not believe
social media needs additional precautions to reduce IDP violations, but still not
share content based on contextual factors such as valance. For this reason, a reduction in sharing
may not be accompanied by a change in overall IDP attitudes. Another key finding on interdependent
privacy attitudes was the narrative condition being associated with an increase in beliefs that
IDP violations are common and occur frequently. This may be a consequence of the narratives
being based on mild and ordinary scenarios, which felt familiar to the participants.
Participant feedback on ways to enhance the interventions effectiveness underline strong
preference for real-world stories as a part of IDP interventions. Even in the narrative condition,
participants noted that they wanted to hear more stories or even stories in the first
person (versus third person). An explanation for participant’s affinity for stories is found
with the narrative transportation theory. It is the idea that narratives are a powerful source
of social influence that engage the audience so that they ‘transport’ into the narrative’s
world. While transported, narratives can be used to persuade behaviors and change attitudes.
The goal of these bottom-up psychosocial interventions was to take a first step
toward changing social norms about IDP through raising awareness and without
relying on technical interventions that would require buy-in from social media platforms.
We observed individual and content difference influence effectiveness. Moreover, our work
identifies content and context strategies that can overcome individual differences
to change attitudes and behaviors about IDP to preserve privacy. Thank you for viewing this
video. Please check out the full conference paper for more details on the study findings,
to include a more in-depth discussion on finding implications and on future research.