Exploring self-disclosure of Facebook users by privacy calculus theory: friendlist richness as an antecedent

In recent years, Facebook is getting more and more popular, with sustained growth of users and penetration into every age group, friend list of users also become larger and more diversified. This situation may be a good news for Facebook because which means users can connect to more friends so as to gain larger benefit on the platform, but at the same time, statistics showed that the amount of “original posts” has been continuing to decline, which meant that users has been becoming more and more reluctant to disclosure themselves on Facebook. Why would that contradiction happen? A report suggested that it is because of privacy problems derived from the excessive number of friends, which attracted our attention and interests. A model based on privacy calculus theory, exploring how friendlist richness influence the benefits and costs of self-disclosure－perceived playfulness and social privacy concern was built, adding role conflict and audience segregation behavior as mediators, combining these variables to explain the impact of self-disclosure on Facebook. Data was collected from an online survey(N=351) and a path analysis was used to evaluate the model. The findings indicated that friendlist richness has positive influence on role conflict but has no influence on perceived playfulness, and role conflict can partly mediate the relationship between friendlist richness with social privacy concern. Social privacy concern has positive influence on audience segregation behaviors, and completely mediate the relationship between role conflict with audience segregation behaviors. Finally, social privacy concern, perceived playfulness has negative and positive influence on self-disclosure respectively, but audience segregation behaviors has no influence on self-disclosure. Based on these findings, we discuss implications for theory and practice and provide suggestions for future research.