Understanding Privacy Switching Behaviour on Twitter

TL;DR

This study investigates why Twitter users switch their account privacy settings, revealing behavioral patterns and motivations through analysis of user activity and surveys, highlighting privacy management strategies.

Contribution

It provides the first large-scale analysis of privacy switching behavior on Twitter, combining quantitative and qualitative methods to understand user motivations.

Findings

Users switch privacy settings over 5 times on average.

Public settings correlate with more mentions and hashtags.

Users turn protected to share personal content and turn public to engage more.

Abstract

Changing a Twitter account's privacy setting between public and protected changes the visibility of past tweets. By inspecting the privacy setting of over 100K Twitter users over 3 months, we noticed that over 40% of those users change their privacy setting at least once with around 16% changing it over 5 times. This motivated us to explore the reasons why people switch their privacy setting. We studied these switching phenomena quantitatively by comparing the tweeting behaviour of users when public vs protected, and qualitatively using two follow-up surveys (n=100, n=324) to understand potential reasoning behind the observed behaviours. Our quantitative analysis shows that users who switch privacy settings mention others and share hashtags more when their setting is public. Our surveys highlighted that users turn protected to share personal content and regulate boundaries while they turn public to interact with others in ways prevented by being protected.