Who discloses the most on Facebook?

Highlights

• Loneliness is a predictor of putting private information on Facebook.

• Young age is predictors of disclosure on Facebook.

• Internet mobile users often disclose private information on Facebook.

Abstract

With the development of new media, the issue of privacy and its determinants has become the subject of a large body of literature in recent years. The main objective of this study was to check whether loneliness is a predictor of putting private information on Facebook. The participants were 887 young people. Facebook Privacy Scale and Loneliness Scale were used. We showed that young age and loneliness are predictors of disclosure on Facebook. Moreover, junior high school students more often put private information on their Facebook profiles than senior high school and university students.

Introduction

The need for privacy is one of the human needs, and privacy gives people their identity, autonomy, and individuality (Jędruszczak, 2005). Self-disclosure is part of social interaction; it is essential to the expression of thoughts and feelings and contributes to creating intimacy in interpersonal relationships (Fisher, 2010). However, in recent years, with the development of new media, the border between what is private and what is not seems to be moving. Social networking sites give people a chance to share private information in an easy way (Glac, Elm, & Martin, 2014). This makes teaching about online privacy crucial to safe information disclosure (Archer et al., 2014). As indicated by previous studies, people have a tendency to disclose more positive vs. negative experiences on Facebook than in real life (Qiu, Lin, Leung, & Tov, 2012). A large body of research reported in the literature shows that disclosure in the Internet often co-occurs with extraversion and agreeableness (Wang, 2013) and with self-esteem or social cohesion (Hollenbaugh & Ferris, 2014). There is also research linking other personality traits with Facebook disclosure. Some authors have assumed that a high level of narcissism is connected with more frequent disclosure of private information on Facebook (Smith, Mendez, & White, 2014). This phenomenon is easy to observe in social networking sites. Especially young users share private information with their Facebook friends. What is more, research has shown that young people disclose more private information on Facebook than adults (Christofides, Muise, & Desmarais, 2011). The motives behind revealing some private information and making it public has been an area of research interest recently, too (Emily Christofides, Muise, & Desmarais, 2009). Is it the function of Facebook or a sign of our modern times? Or perhaps there are some characteristics of users that make them more prone to sharing their privacy? Although in some studies interpersonal differences connected with disclosure and nondisclosure on Facebook have been found, the results are ambiguous and this field of research is still weakly explored.

The main objective of this study was to check whether loneliness can be a predictor of posting private information on Facebook more often. The novelty of this study lies in connecting disclosure with loneliness and in the examination of this relationship in different age groups: junior high school, senior high school, and university level. It can be assumed that those who feel more lonely want to relieve this feeling by sharing more private information with their friends. The study is planned to verify whether there are age differences in this relation. The added value of this study lies in the fact that it considers the possible and not fully explained relationship of sharing important news on Facebook with well-being and a higher level of stress (Bevan, Gomez, & Sparks, 2014).

This line of research was partly inspired by several of studies that found a connection between Facebook use and loneliness. For instance, the longitudinal study by Teppers, Luyckx, Klimstra, and Goossens (2014), who examined the group of adolescents, revealed that depending on the motives for using Facebook this activity can have different impact on loneliness. The authors found that with Facebook used for social skills compensation peer-related loneliness increased and that Facebook used as a way of making new friends helps in decreasing the feeling of loneliness. By contrast, in the study on college students by Lou, Yan, Nickerson, and McMorris (2012) it was found that neither loneliness nor the motive for using Facebook influenced Facebook intensity. Decreased loneliness can be linked with feeling a connection with Facebook friends in the context of everyday problems(Deters & Mehl, 2013). Loneliness was the characteristic that determined the frequency of Facebook use and preferences for specific features on Facebook (Ryan & Xenos, 2011). In their recent study, Al-Saggaf and Nielsen (2014) analyzed the content of Facebook profiles and distinguished two groups of users: the lonely and the connected. They showed that loneliness and feeling connected may be related to specific patterns of Facebook use. The group of Facebook users labeled “lonely” more often disclosed their personal information, relationship information, and address in than “connected” people, whereas the latter group disclosed their views and their wall more often than “lonely” people. The authors suggested that females who were lonely more often disclosed their personal information and relationship information on Facebook. However, the result of the experiment conducted by Deters and Mehl (2013) showed that after experimentally increasing their status updating activity people felt less lonely and more connected with friends. Facebook can be used as compensation of the small number of friends in reality – such a conclusion was drawn Skues, Williams, and Wise (2012), who found that loneliness was positively related to a higher number of Facebook friends. Sharing private information about important life events can be detrimental for well-being and covaries with a higher level of stress (Bevan et al., 2014). The meta-analysis done by Song, Zmyslinski-Seelig, Kim, Drent, Victor, Omori et al. (Song et al., 2014) supported the causal direction of the relationship between Facebook use and loneliness, confirming that people who feel lonely use Facebook.

To sum up, we supposed that loneliness was strongly related to Facebook disclosure and could predict it. Studies on this issue conducted simultaneously in three age groups are novel. We hypothesized that loneliness would be a predictor of Facebook disclosure and that this relation would be stronger in the younger group. The hypotheses were tested among adolescents and young adults. Youth is the period when peers look for important reference groups, and being accepted and liked by the group is of additional value. Therefore, young people might want to interact with their friends and reveal some personal information on their profiles in order to catch other users' attention and to promote themselves. On the basis of the existing literature on sociometric popularity (e.g., Newcomb et al., 1993, Parkhurst and Hopmeyer, 1998), we may conclude that being admired, getting as many “likes” as possible might be of paramount importance especially at that age.