This paper qualitatively examines how members of a large private Facebook group view the risks of information disclosure to their privacy and the strategies they employ to navigate and manage those risks. The paper adds to an emerging interest in how privacy is managed collectively and within dynamic large groups, thus moving beyond established knowledge of privacy management on individual and small-scale levels. The work builds on semi-structured interviews with 20 members of a private Facebook group and draws on Communication Privacy Management theory. The study shows how privacy management practices are enacted at individual, intragroup, and group levels. Findings show that participants associate very high risks with sharing private information in the group, partly because it consists of a mix of known others and strangers, who are potentially geographically co-located. They adopt several strategies for managing and protecting their privacy at all three levels. The risks associated with context, time, and spatial collapse of the imagined audience are identified as important to how participants experience information disclosure in the group. The paper concludes by identifying some practical implications that serve as a call for developers to design privacy tools that support dynamic groups’ privacy challenges and needs. 

Social networking sites have become indispensable information and communication tools in everyday life. This qualitative study investigated the information-related activities and affordances of a Facebook group for foreign mothers living in Sweden. Four key information activities were identified: posting, monitoring, commenting and searching. These activities show how the group members accessed the information resources embedded within the group in a variety of visible, invisible, active and passive modes. The article concludes with a discussion of how these different modes are facilitated by the affordances of visibility, accessibility, persistence and associations.

Purpose

This study aims to develop an in-depth understanding of the underlying dynamics of an emergent shared information practice within a Facebook group, and the resources the group develops to sustain this practice.

Design/methodology/approach

In-depth semi-structured interviews were carried out with twenty members from the group. The findings are based on comparative analysis combined with narrative analysis and were interpreted using theories of situated learning and Community of Practice.

Findings

The study shows that although members of this multicultural mothers group endorsed different, sometimes opposing parenting practices, the group had to find common ground when sharing information. Managing these challenges was key to maintaining the group as an open information resource for all members. The group produced a shared repertoire of resources to maintain its activities, including norms, rules, shared understandings, and various monitoring activities. The shared online practice developed by the community is conceptualised in this article as an information practice requiring shared, community-specific understandings of what, when, and how information can or should be sought or shared in ways that are valued in this specific community. The findings show that this shared information practice is not static but continually evolves as members negotiate what is, or not, important for the group.

Originality/value

The research provides novel insights into the underlying dynamics of the emergence, management, and sustainability of a shared information practice within a contemporary mothers group on Facebook.

Introduction. The article explores whether members of a Facebook group view the group as a source of credible information and how they evaluate the credibility of information provided in the group. Method. The data for this study were collected using semi-structured interviews with 19 members of a closed Facebook group for mothers. Analysis. The constant comparison technique was used to analyse the interview transcripts which were interpreted from a sociocultural perspective using the concepts of cultural tools and cognitive authority. Results. The findings show that although the participants used the Facebook group to seek information, they did not consider it a credible source of information. The study contributes the insight that assessments depended on the domain of the information and that participants distinguished between information offered in a professional or a personal capacity. A number of cultural tools were employed to negotiate credibility assessments, including language use and writing style, expertise, life experience, educational background, and similar lifestyles, parenting values and worldviews. Conclusions. The Facebook group was characterised by a combination of familiar and unfamiliar others, of the sharing and seeking of information from different domains and of first- and second-hand knowledge. The participants employed various cultural tools to assess credibility in this mixture of knowledge domains and information sources.