Collaborative Research: EAGER: Understanding Privacy Violations of Racial and Ethnic Minorities in Online Photo Sharing

Photo sharing on social media is occurring at unprecedented rates; yet, the privacy of photo subjects and photo bystanders is frequently ignored during sharing. Viral internet ‘memes’ are often the result of embarrassing photos taken out of context, putting the photo subject at risk of cyber-bullying, shaming, and abuse. People from marginalized or vulnerable groups are especially at risk.

The project’s novelties are to understand how social group memberships of people sharing photos and of photo targets influence online photo sharing. As such, the research team examines the contextual factors of the photo and the individual characteristics of photo perceivers that influence their willingness to share photo memes depicting strangers.

The project’s broader significance and importance are to illuminate the role that bias plays in one of the most common modes of communication, as well as inform the creation of interventions that circumvent biased behavior on the part of social media users in the future. Moreover, this project paves the way for multiple new lines of research, as it pioneers a new stimulus set and methodology to understand how intergroup biases influence privacy decisions and includes participants of various racial and ethnic groups.

The project includes a set of studies that is among the first to examine the role of bias and social group membership in privacy and sharing decisions on social media. Across the studies, the researchers validate a new stimulus set with photo-based memes representing diverse photo subjects and situations and examine the extent to which decisions to share photo memes of other people vary based on the group membership of participants and photo targets, using multiple behavioral methods.

Of primary interest is whether different groups of participants differentially protect the privacy of others across various social group memberships (e.g., gender, race, and age).

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.