Contextualizing how teens manage personal and interpersonal privacy on social media

Many researchers have been studying teens’ privacy management on social media, and how they individually control information. Employing the theoretical framework of communication privacy management (CPM) theory, I argue that individual information control in itself is desirable but insufficient, giving only a limited understanding of teens’ privacy practices. Instead, I argue that research should focus on both personal and interpersonal privacy management to ultimately understand teens’ privacy practices. Using a survey study ( n = 2000), I investigated the predictors of teens’ personal and interpersonal privacy management on social media and compared different types of boundary coordination. The results demonstrate that feelings of fatalism regarding individual control in a networked social environment, which I call networked defeatism, are positively related with interpersonal privacy management. Also, interpersonal privacy management is less important when coordinating boundaries with peers than it is when coordinating sexual materials, and dealing with personal information shared by parents.

"Girls are stricter in their privacy management than boys. In addition, age was positively related to personal privacy manegement (managing privacy individually). However, a negative relationship was found between age and interpersonal privacy management (managing privacy together with others). In general theories, teens’ “boundaries expand to accommodate the increasing privacy needs that he or she develops”. The results indicate that in this process teens increasingly rely on individual privacy management strategies rather than collaboratively managing privacy. Furthermore, when feeling more fatalistic toward individual control in a networked social environment, teenagers are more likely to negotiate and make agreements with others in their network. Teens are also more prone to managing privacy with others when sharing sexually explicit information. In everyday discourse sexting is regularly labeled as risky and/or “unnatural sexualized passions of the young”. With parents sharing information that is of their concern (sharenting) they also are more likely to negotiate as opposed to interpersonal privacy management with friends in general. Concerning sharenting, the motivations of parents for sharenting, and how they consider (or not) teens’ privacy in this process is too often researched while. the voice of teenagers is mostly missing. Teens are stricter when managing boundaries with parents than with peers assuming that general privacy management processes with friends are more routinized and implicit." (De Wolf, 2020, pp. 1069-1070)