Risk perceptions on social media use in Norway

Abstract

Social media are getting more and more ingrained into everybody’s lives. With people’s more substantial presence on social media, threat actors exploit the platforms and the information that people share there to deploy and execute various types of attacks. This paper focuses on the Norwegian population, exploring how people perceive risks arising from the use of social media, focusing on the analysis of specific indicators such as age, sexes and differences among the users of distinct social media platforms. For data collection, a questionnaire was structured and deployed towards the users of multiple social media platforms (total n = 329). The analysis compares risk perceptions of using the social media platforms Facebook (n = 288), Twitter (n = 134), Reddit (n = 189) and Snapchat (n = 267). Furthermore, the paper analyses the differences between the sexes and between the digital natives and non-natives. Our sample also includes sufferers of ID theft (n = 50). We analyse how account compromise occurs and how suffering ID theft changes behaviour and perception. The results show significant discrepancies in the risk perception among the social media platform users across the examined indicators, but also explicit variations on how this affects the associated usage patterns. Based on the results, we propose a generic risk ranking of social media platforms, activities, sharing and a threat model for SoMe users. The results show the lack of a unified perception of risk on social media, indicating the need for targeted security awareness enhancement mechanisms focusing on this topic.