Siegel, D. A. (2013). Will You Accept the Governments Friend Request? Social Networks and Privacy Concerns.
From Digital Culture & Society
Siegel, D. A. (2013). Will You Accept the Government's Friend Request? Social Networks and Privacy Concerns. Plos ONE, 8(11), 1-6. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0080682
Kevin Pendergast
In the article “Will You Accept the Government’s Friend Request? Social Networks and Privacy Concerns” by David A. Siegal, Siegal discusses the human side of the online surveillance debate. What are people’s opinions on the government’s monitoring of social media? Does using social media more cause a lesser concern for one’s own privacy? Are people more willing to give up privacy when policies are framed with a pro-security reasoning? Siegal provides two hypotheses in this article, firstly, “Prompting security concerns increases individual support for governmental monitoring of the internet.” This hypothesis delves into whether people are willing to sacrifice privacy freedoms in order to combat security threats like terrorism. Secondly, Siegal hypothesizes, “The effect of exposure to prompted security concerns on individual support for governmental monitoring of the internet decreases as social network website use increases.” To prove his hypotheses, Siegal created a survey which contained an array of people, including some who did not use social media at all and some who are frequent users.
It was refreshing for Siegel’s argument to not focus on whether one’s view towards government monitoring changes with more social media use. Instead, keeping the context of his argument focused on the effect of packaging security concerns with government monitoring on the public’s perception of government monitoring online allows for conversations on the possibility of governments using events where national security threatened such as 9/11 and the shootings in Paris in 2015 as an excuse to pass policies which provide government agencies with greater surveillance capabilities as exemplified through the US’s Patriot Act and the laws passed by France in 2015.
It is curious in Siegel’s approach to how he addresses his hypothesis. He brings up more questions than he is prepared to answer. This is evident when he brings up Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s quote, ‘‘[p]eople have really gotten comfortable...sharing more information...[t]hat social norm is just something that has evolved over time”. Although he agrees there is some validity from Zuckerberg’s stance, however Siegel proposes that long-time frequent users of social media understand the privacy landscape to which he believes most have developed a filtering mechanism to whom would be much more susceptible to influence from security concerns. Furthermore, Siegel contrasts this with the idea that frequent social media users understand the privacy consequences but decide to share despite them. He concludes that since the users made a conscious choice to give up personal information, they are less likely to be influenced by security concerns. Siegel uses these self discussions as a leadup to his second hypothesis. By doing so, the reader has a much greater understanding as to how Seigel reached the conclusion and therefore may be more sympathetic to his hypothesis. Prior to revealing the results of his survey, Seigel has the reader questioning, much like himself, of the different possibilities as to how frequent users perceive their own privacy online and whether this would change with security concerns.
When Siegel begins to get in to details of the survey and the results he explains his expectations for each test group. This keeps the reader closely connected with Siegel though process as he narrates his study where he tip-toes around bias fairly successfully. He backs up the results of his test in detail and uses two graphics which effectively demonstrate the difference in responses from the control and treatment groups while providing the reader with a visual experience which may communicate the results better to some. This is evident as it significantly helps communicate how the results of his survey support the claims in his first hypothesis. Furthermore, Siegel’s use of the table on the third page layouts the various variable statistics including the random effects for participants’ states during the survey. This level of detail makes the communication of his survey more concrete and therefore serves his argument well. In addition, Siegel again uses his graphic effectively as “Figure 2” communicates results of his survey which strongly support his second hypothesis as it demonstrates a clear trend that the more a participant uses social media, the less impactful the security concern treatment is on them. Siegal then used a second table to demonstrate how statistically similar the treatment group was to the control group to further solidify the validity of his survey. He has whole section analyzing his data to present how thoroughly reliable the data from his survey was. Overall, the way that Siegel went about arguing his hypotheses and then how he proceeded to prove them and ensure his data was unquestionable makes for a very strong article which insights new knowledge to the discussion of online security. Understanding how social media users think about privacy is very important if we are to better understand the effects of social media and help find possible solutions to help combat online monitoring.
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