A balancing act: how risk mitigation strategies employed by users explain the privacy paradox on social media

While there is a growing body of literature on information privacy suggesting different mechanisms of how people’s privacy concerns might be impacting their attitudes and behaviour when using social media, recent questionable data use practices by social media platforms and third parties call for a renewed validation of existing information privacy models. The objective of this research is to re-examine the variables predicting why people disclose information on social media. Building on previous work, this paper puts forward a comprehensive Privacy Concerns and Social Media Use Model (PC-SMU) and evaluates it in a specific cultural and legal environment (social media users from a single county, Canada). The study delves into the privacy paradox and shows that the benefits of using social media are the main driver of self-disclosure, and that self-disclosing behaviours are nuanced by the users’ information privacy protection strategies. We also find that higher levels of social media literacy, and concerns about organisational threats to a lesser extent, lead to higher levels of information privacy management, emphasizing the importance of educating users about how to use the different privacy and security features provided by social media platforms.