Based on the antecedent-privacy concern-outcome (APCO) model of privacy concerns, this study developed a moderated mediation model to investigate the mechanisms by which social media privacy policies (including both privacy policy understanding and perceived effectiveness dimensions) influence self-disclosure. The model was tested in this study using a deductive approach and a quantitative research strategy. In this study, a self-reported questionnaire was used to collect information from social media users. To test the research model and hypotheses, we used multiple regression analysis. According to the results of this study, trust in social media mediated the relationship between privacy policy and self-disclosure, while privacy costs moderated the relationship between privacy policy and trust in social media. Furthermore, the link between privacy policy and self-disclosure is a complex multicollinear model with mediating effects rather than a simple linear model.
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The growing popularity of social media as an important communication and information dissemination channels has attracted much attention from both academia and business in recent years. Taddei and Contena (2013) describes social media as interconnected communication platforms where users: (1) publish their personal profiles that include user-supplied media, other user-supplied content, and system-supplied data; (2) interact and connect with other users; and (3) interact with or access user-generated content provided by user associations in social media networks (Ahmed, 2015; Lyngdoh, El-Manstrly, & Jeesha, 2023; McCarthy, Rowan, Mahony, & Vergne, 2023; Smith, Dinev, & Xu, 2011). Social media platforms and other Web 2.0 technologies provide users with convenient and easily accessible ways to interact and disclose personal information not only with their friends and acquaintances, but also with complete and relative strangers with unprecedented openness. This, in turn, has increased people's longevity and ability to share more information about themselves and their relationships with their families and friends through a variety of media, including video, photo, and text, enabling them to build and maintain social and business relationships. However, when using social networks, users often face privacy disclosure risks, leading to increasingly serious privacy threats, including privacy disclosure and privacy sharing without the user's consent; as a result, users are becoming more cautious about disclosing private information (Ampong et al., 2018; Arpaci, 2020; Bandara, Fernando, & Akter, 2020; Klostermann, Meißner, Max, & Decker, 2023; Lane, Ramirez, & Patton, 2023). According to Brown (2020), nearly half of Internet users were affected by cybersecurity incidents in the first half of 2020, of which 23.3% were due to personal data disclosure (Cottrill, Jacobs, Markovic, & Edwards, 2020; Hong, Hu, & Zhao, 2023; Khan, Ikram, Murtaza, & Asadi, 2023). To address this issue, social media platforms often protect users' privacy and related rights by publishing privacy policies. Privacy policies include a set of procedures for managing and protecting users' personal data, as well as establishing basic rights and obligations, with the aim of reducing perceived risks arising from users' transactions with the platform (Amon et al., 2023; Choi, 2023; Dhir, Talwar, Kaur, Budhiraja, & Islam, 2021).