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Parents posting photos and other information about children on social media is increasingly common and a recent source of controversy. We investigated characteristics that predict parental sharing behavior by collecting information from 493 parents of young children in the United States on self-reported demographics, social media activity, parenting styles, children’s social media engagement, and parental sharing attitudes and behaviors. Our findings indicate that most social media active parents share photos of their children online and feel comfortable doing so without their child’s permission. The strongest predictor of parental sharing frequency was general social media posting frequency, suggesting that participants do not strongly differentiate between “regular” photo-sharing activities and parental sharing. Predictors of parental sharing frequency include greater social media engagement, larger social networks with norms encouraging parental sharing, more permissive and confident parenting styles, and greater social media engagement by their children. Contrasting previous research that often highlights benefits of parental sharing, our findings point to a number of risky online behaviors associated with parental sharing not previously uncovered. Implications for children’s privacy and early social media exposure are discussed, including future directions for influencing parental sharing attitudes and behaviors. 

We investigate how people’s ‘humor style’ relates to their online photo-sharing behaviors and reactions to ‘privacy primes’. In an online experiment, we queried 437 participants about their humor style, likelihood to share photo-memes, and history of sharing others’ photos. In two treatment conditions, participants were either primed to imagine themselves as the photo-subjects or to consider the photo-subjects’ privacy before sharing memes. We found that participants who frequently use aggressive and self-deprecating humor were more likely to violate others’ privacy by sharing photos. We also replicated the interventions’ paradoxical effects – increasing sharing likelihood – as reported in earlier work and identified the subgroups that demonstrated this behavior through interaction analyses. When primed to consider the subjects’ privacy, only humor deniers (participants who use humor infrequently) demonstrated increased sharing. In contrast, when imagining themselves as the photo-subjects, humor deniers, unlike other participants, did not increase the sharing of photos. 

This study tested the effect of visual attention on decision-making in digital environments. Fifty-nine individuals were asked how likely they would be to share 40 memes (photos with superimposed captions) on social media while their eye movements were tracked. The likelihood of sharing memes increased as attention to the text of the meme increased; conversely, the likelihood of sharing decreased as attention to the image of the meme increased. In addition, increased trait levels of agreeableness predicted a greater likelihood of sharing memes. These results indicate that individual differences in personality and eye movements predict the likelihood of sharing photo-memes on social media platforms. 

We investigate the effects of perspective taking, privacy cues, and portrayal of photo subjects (i.e., photo valence) on decisions to share photos of people via social media. In an online experiment we queried 379 participants about 98 photos (that were previously rated for photo valence) in three conditions: (1) Baseline: participants judged their likelihood of sharing each photo; (2) Perspective-taking: participants judged their likelihood of sharing each photo when cued to imagine they are the person in the photo; and (3) Privacy: participants judged their likelihood to share after being cued to consider the privacy of the person in the photo. While participants across conditions indicated a lower likelihood of sharing photos that portrayed people negatively, they – surprisingly – reported a higher likelihood of sharing photos when primed to consider the privacy of the person in the photo. Frequent photo sharers on real-world social media platforms and people without strong personal privacy preferences were especially likely to want to share photos in the experiment, regardless of how the photo portrayed the subject. A follow-up study with 100 participants explaining their responses revealed that the Privacy condition led to a lack of concern with others’ privacy. These findings suggest that developing interventions for reducing photo sharing and protecting the privacy of others is a multivariate problem in which seemingly obvious solutions can sometimes go awry.