Balancing Privacy Concerns and Impression Management Strategies on Facebook

Social network sites like Facebook allow users to engage in selfpresentation through a variety of text-based, visual, and interactive features, and numerous studies have examined the various social and technical strategies Facebook users engage in to manage their online persona. That said, few studies have examined how engagement in these impression management strategies varies across users. This paper presents initial findings from a large (N=833) study including three samples to evaluate the relationship between individual factors, network composition and privacy concerns with the use of social and technical features to regulate access to personal information on Facebook. Rather than a straightforward relationship between privacy concerns and impression management, findings suggest that engagement in these strategies involves a number of contextual factors such as age, sex, and Internet efficacy. These complex relationships are discussed with a focus on implications for researchers and designers to consider when evaluating and building these systems.