The BigFoot Initiative: An Investigation of Digital Footprint Awareness in Social Media

ABSTRACT

Social media has become an important part of modern-day communication. Advantages span from instant communication via direct messages to sharing and consuming content and experiences. Lately, social media applications have been criticized for assisting the spreading of harmful or fake news and distorting reality by enabling unauthentic self-representation. It is often argued, that social media platforms are solely responsible for these challenges and for offering solutions. This research uses the notion of a digital footprint, a codified representation of a user's social media engagement, to facilitate user reflection. This footprint, however, is mostly a product of the user's deliberate and conscious engagement. This paper argues that users also have a responsibility in addressing the above-mentioned challenges by increasing their awareness of their social media usage. This paper presents a study with close to 300 participants investigating if they are aware of their digital footprint in social media. The paper presents the overall challenges, as well as experimental design and results, with the goal of motivating further debate regarding user awareness of their social media usage.

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Index Terms

• Human-centered computing

  • Collaborative and social computing

    • Collaborative and social computing theory, concepts and paradigms

      • Social networks

• Information systems

  • World Wide Web

    • Web applications

      • Crowdsourcing

        • Trust

• Networks

  • Network types

    • Overlay and other logical network structures

      • Social media networks