"Adulthood is trying each of the same six passwords that you use for everything": The Scarcity and Ambiguity of Security Advice on Social Media

Abstract

In order to keep one's computing systems and data secure, it is critical to be aware of how to effectively maintain security and privacy online. Prior experimental work has shown that social media are effective platforms for encouraging security-enhancing behavior. Through an analysis of historical social media logs of 38 participants containing almost 200,000 social media posts, we study the extent to which participants talked about security and privacy on social media platforms, specifically Facebook and Twitter. We found that interactions with posts that feature content relevant to security and privacy made up less than 0.09% of all interactions we observed. A thematic analysis of the security- and privacy-related posts that participants interacted with revealed that such posts very rarely discussed security and privacy constructively, instead often joking about security practices or encouraging undesirable behavior. Based on the overall findings from this thematic analysis, we develop and present a taxonomy of how security and privacy may be typically discussed on social networks, which is useful for constructing helpful security and privacy advice or for identifying advice that may have an undesirable impact. Our findings, though based on a fraction of the population of social media users, suggest that while social networks may be effective in influencing security behavior, there may not be enough substantial or useful discussions of security and privacy to encourage better security behaviors in practice and on a larger scale. Our findings highlight the importance of increasing the prevalence of constructive security and privacy advice on online social media in order to encourage widespread adoption of healthy security practices.