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Are you Facebook dependent?

What drives you to Facebook? News? Games? Feedback on your posts? The chance to meet new friends?

If any of these hit home, you might have a Facebook dependency. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing, says Amber Ferris, an assistant professor of communication at The University of Akron’s Wayne College.

Ferris, who studies Facebook user trends, says the more people use Facebook to fulfill their goals, the more dependent on it the become. She is quick to explain this dependency is not equivalent to an addiction. Rather, the reason why people use Facebook determines the level of dependency they have on the social network. The study found those who use Facebook to meet new people were the most dependent on Facebook overall.

To identify dependency factors, Ferris and Erin Hollenbaugh, an associate professor of communication studies at Kent State University at Stark, studied 301 Facebook users between the ages of 18 and 68 who post on the site at least once a month. They found that people who perceive Facebook as helpful in gaining a better understanding of themselves go to the site to meet new people and to get attention from others. Also, people who use Facebook to gain a deeper understanding of themselves tend to have agreeable personalities, but lower self-esteem than others.

Ferris explains that some users observe how others cope with problems and situations similar to their own “and get ideas on how to approach others in important and difficult situations.”

Ferris and Hollenbaugh presented “A Uses and Gratifications Approach to Exploring Antecedents to Facebook Dependency” at the National Communication Association conference in Las Vegas in November. They say other Facebook dependency signs point to users’ needs for information or entertainment. In other words, a user knows about the local festival scheduled for this weekend thanks to Facebook.

In their previous studies, “Facebook Self-disclosure: Examining the Role of Traits, Social Cohesion, and Motives” (2014) and “Predictors of Honesty, Intent, and Valence of Facebook Self-disclosure” (2015) published in the journal Computers in Human Behavior, Ferris and Hollenbaugh also uncovered personality traits common among specific types of Facebook users.

For example, people who use Facebook to establish new relationships tend to be extroverted. Extroverts are more open to sharing their personal information online, but are not always honest with their disclosures, Ferris says.

The most positive posts online come from those who have high self-esteem, according to Ferris.

“Those who post the most and are the most positive in posts do so to stay connected with people they already know and to gain others’ attention,” Ferris says. “This makes a lot of sense – if you are happy with your life, you are more likely to want to share that happiness with others on social media.”

Envy key motivator behind many Facebook posts, but site hurts mental well-being

A new study by Sauder School of Business Professor Izak Benbasat and his collaborators shows that envy is a key motivator behind Facebook posts and that contributes to a decrease in mental well-being among users.

Creating a vicious cycle of jealousy and self-importance, the researchers say Facebook leads users to feel their lives are unfulfilling by comparison, and react by creating posts that portray their best selves.

“Social media participation has been linked to depression, anxiety and narcissistic behaviour, but the reasons haven’t been well-explained,” said Benbasat, Sauder’s Distinguished Professor of Information Systems. “We found envy to be the missing link.”

According to Benbasat, travel photos are a leading contributor to Facebook envy, pushing friends to post their most perfect pictures. He says the unrealistic portrayal of life is not motivated by the desire to make others jealous, but rather a need to compete and keep up appearances.

Benbasat says the functionality of social networks encourages envy-inducing behaviour, and that’s unlikely to change.

“Sharing pictures and stories about the highlights of your life – that’s so much of what Facebook is for, so you can’t take that away,” he said. “But I think it’s important for people to know what impact it can have on their well-being. Parents and teachers should take note as young people can be particularly vulnerable to the dark side of social media.”

The study, “Why Following Friends Can Hurt You: Empirical Investigation of the Effects of Envy on Social Networking Sites”, was published in the latest issue of Information Systems Research.

Uncontrolled use of Facebook

A new study shows that the combination of social anxiety and the need for social assurance by feeling part of a group increases the risk for excessive and uncontrolled use of Facebook, which can negatively affect school performance, work, and one’s health and well-being, as described in an article published in Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, a peer-reviewed journal. The article is available free on the Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking (www.liebertpub.com/cyber) website until November 7, 2015.

In “Hooked on Facebook: The Role of Social Anxiety and Need for Social Assurance in Problematic Use of Facebook (online.liebertpub.com/doi/full/10.1089/cyber.2015.0002),” the authors present the results of a study in U.S. college students. Both social anxiety and the need for social assurance were positive predictors of problematic Facebook use, but the link between social anxiety and excessive use of Facebook was only significant for users who had medium to high levels of need for social assurance, defined as a strong desire to seek companionship and interact with others. The authors note that the combined social connections capability and messaging features of Facebook may offer an appealing social media environment for users with social anxiety.

Habitual Facebook users: Suckers for social media scams?

A new study finds that habitual use of Facebook makes individuals susceptible to social media phishing attacks by criminals, likely because they automatically respond to requests without considering how they are connected with those sending the requests, how long they have known them, or who else is connected with them.

Predictors of habitual use of Facebook include frequent interactions with the platform, a large number of friend connections, and individuals’ inability to regulate their social media consumption.

see: Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication

Friend or Foe

The mutual-friends feature on social networks such as Facebook, which displays users’ shared friendships, might not be so “friendly.”

Often revered for bringing people together, the mutual-friends feature on Facebook actually creates myriad security risks and privacy concerns according to a University of Pittsburgh study. The study demonstrates that even though users can tailor their privacy settings, hackers can still find private information through mutual-friends features.

Using computer simulation programs and an offline Facebook dataset containing 63 731 users, the researchers first demonstrated a “friend exposure” attack, exploring how many private friends an “attacker” could find of a specific target user. The attacks were tested on 10 randomly chosen user groups with sizes ranging between 500 and 5 000 individuals, as well as sample groups that were computer generated based on shared interests across user profiles. The same process was used for the “distant neighbor exposure attack,” through which the attacker’s goal was to identify private distant neighbors from the initial target. These distant neighbors indicate users that are friends of friends of the target user (two degrees of separation) or even friends of friends of friends of the target user (three degrees of separation).

Finally, the team initiated a “hybrid attack,” in which an attacker tried to identify both the target’s private friends and distant neighbors.

They found that an attacker identified more than 60 percent of a target’s private friends in the “mutual-friend based attack.” Likewise, an attacker could find, on average, 67 percent of a target’s private distant neighbors by using 100 compromised user accounts.

The study shows the need for better privacy-protection settings to mitigate the problem — those that can also be easily navigated by users.

The paper, Mutual-friend Based attacks in Social Network Systems, was first published online April 22 in Computers & Security.