CHAPTER 2

LITERATURE REVIEW

“The web has always been a social networking tool. From digital bulletin boards to
email listservs to online chat rooms, the internet has transformed the way we
communicate with one another.” (Anneke, 2008).

The way people live these days is definitely different than the previous, people now tend
to share their daily life events, news and even feelings and emotions with others. Social
networks site (SNSs) has provided the facility of enabling them to do so.

Social network sites has changed the method people communicate with

Social data revolution

The Social Data Revolution (SDR) is the shift in human communication patterns towards
increased personal information sharing and its related implications, made possible by the
rise of social networks in early 2000s. While social networks were used in the early days
to privately share photos and private messages, the subsequent trend towards people
passively and actively sharing personal information more broadly has resulted in
unprecedented amounts of public data.

Definition of social network sites

There a lot of definitions to social media and networks are there in the research
community.

Janet Fouts in her book “Social Media Success!”, defines the social media as “people
engaged in conversation around a topic online.” (Fouts, 2009).
Her definition is a generalization to the whole topic, so there is another definition by
Boyd and Ellison that is “Social network sites are defined as wed-based services that
allow individuals to three main points the first is to construct a public or semi-public
profile within a system, the second is to formulate a list of other users with whom they
share a connection, and the third is to view and cutoff their list of connections and those
made by others within the system.” (Beer, 2008)

This definition describes in specific the way people connect through the social network
sites, and the nature and classification of these connections may vary from site to site.

What makes social network sites unique is not that they allow individuals to meet
strangers, but rather that they enable users to articulate and make visible their social
networks. This can result in connections between individuals that would not otherwise be
made, but that is often not the goal, and these meetings are frequently between "latent
ties" (Haythornthwaite, 2005) who share some offline connection. On many of the large
SNSs, participants are not necessarily "networking" or looking to meet new people;
instead, they are primarily communicating with people who are already a part of their
extended social network. To emphasize this articulated social network as a critical
organizing feature of these sites, we label them "social network sites."

While SNSs have implemented a wide variety of technical features, their backbone
consists of visible profiles that display a clear list of Friends who are also users of the
system. Profiles are unique pages where one can "type oneself into being" (Sundén, 2003,
p. 3). After joining an SNS, an individual is asked to fill out forms containing a series of
questions. The profile is generated using the answers to these questions, which typically
include descriptors such as age, location, interests, and an "about me" section. Most sites
also encourage users to upload a profile photo. Some sites allow users to enhance their
profiles by adding multimedia content or modifying their profile's look and feel. Others,
such as Facebook and twitter, allow users to add modules ("Applications") that enhance
their profile.
The visibility of a profile varies by site and according to user discretion. By default,
profiles on Friendster and Tribe.net are crawled by search engines, making them visible
to anyone, regardless of whether or not the viewer has an account. Alternatively,
LinkedIn controls what a viewer may see based on whether she or he has a paid account.
Sites like MySpace allow users to choose whether they want their profile to be public or
"Friends only." Facebook takes a different approach by default, users who are part of the
same "network" can view each other's profiles, unless a profile owner has decided to
deny permission to those in their network. Structural variations around visibility and
access are one of the primary ways that SNSs differentiate themselves from each other.

After joining a social network site, users are prompted to identify others in the system
with whom they have a relationship. The label for these relationships differs depending
on the site, popular terms include "Friends", "Contacts", and "Fans". Most SNSs require
bi-directional confirmation for Friendship, but some do not. These one-directional ties are
sometimes labeled as "Fans" or "Followers", but many sites call these Friends as well.
The term "Friends" can be misleading, because the connection does not necessarily mean
friendship in the everyday vernacular sense, and the reasons people connect are varied
(boyd, 2006a).

The public display of connections is a crucial component of SNSs. The Friends list
contains links to each Friend's profile, enabling viewers to navigate the network graph by
clicking through the Friends lists. On most sites, the list of Friends is visible to anyone
who is permitted to view the profile, although there are exceptions. For instance, some
MySpace users have hacked their profiles to hide the Friends display, and LinkedIn
allows users to opt out of displaying their network.

Most SNSs also provide a mechanism for users to leave messages on their Friends'
profiles. This feature typically involves leaving "comments", although sites employ
various labels for this feature. In addition, SNSs often have a private messaging feature
similar to webmail. While both private messages and comments are popular on most of
the major SNSs, they are not universally available.

Not all social network sites began as such. QQ started as a Chinese instant messaging
service, LunarStorm as a community site, Cyworld as a Korean discussion forum tool,
and Skyrock (formerly Skyblog) was a French blogging service before adding SNS
features. Classmates.com, a directory of school affiliates launched in 1995, began
supporting articulated lists of Friends after SNSs became popular. AsianAvenue,
MiGente, and BlackPlanet were early popular ethnic community sites with limited
Friends functionality before re-launching in 2005-2006 with SNS features and structure.

Beyond profiles, Friends, comments, and private messaging, SNSs vary greatly in their
features and user base. Some have photo-sharing or video-sharing capabilities; others
have built-in blogging and instant messaging technology. There are mobile-specific SNSs
(e.g., Dodgeball), but some web-based SNSs also support limited mobile interactions
(e.g., Facebook, MySpace, and Cyworld). Many SNSs target people from specific
geographical regions or linguistic groups, although this does not always determine the
site's community. Orkut, for example, was launched in the United States with an English-
only interface, but Portuguese-speaking Brazilians quickly became the dominant user
group (Kopytoff, 2004). Some sites are designed with specific ethnic, religious, sexual
orientation, political, or other identity-driven categories in mind. There are even SNSs for
dogs (Dogster) and cats (Catster), although their owners must manage their profiles.

While SNSs are often designed to be widely accessible, many attract homogeneous
populations initially, so it is not uncommon to find groups using sites to separate
themselves out by nationality, age, educational level, or other factors that typically
segment society (Hargittai, 2008), even if that was not the intention of the designers.
A History of Social Network Sites

The Early Years

The first recognizable social network site launched in 1997. SixDegrees.com allowed
users to create profiles, list their Friends and, beginning in 1998, surf the Friends lists.
Each of these features existed in some form before SixDegrees of course. Profiles existed
on most major dating sites and many community sites. AIM and ICQ buddy lists
supported lists of Friends, although those Friends were not visible to others.
Classmates.com allowed people to connect with their high school or college and surf the
network for others who were also joined, but users could not create profiles or list Friends
until years later. The first to combine these features was SixDegrees.

SixDegrees promoted itself as a tool to help people connect with and send messages to
others. While SixDegrees attracted millions of users, it failed to continue, the service
closed in 2000. Looking back, its founder believes that SixDegrees was simply ahead of
its time. While people were already flocking to the Internet, most did not have extended
networks of friends who were online. Early adopters complained that there was little to
do after accepting Friend requests, and most users were not interested in meeting
strangers.

From 1997 to 2001, a number of community tools began supporting various

combinations of profiles and publicly articulated Friends. AsianAvenue, BlackPlanet, and
MiGente allowed users to create personal, professional, and dating profiles, users could
identify Friends on their personal profiles without seeking approval for those
connections. Likewise, shortly after its launch in 1999, LiveJournal listed one-directional
connections on user pages. People mark others as Friends to follow their journals and
manage privacy settings. The Korean virtual worlds site Cyworld was created in 1999 as
a personal information management system, a web-based PDA-like service that was later
revitalized in 2001 as a full-blown social network site with the launch of its template-
based homepage service (Kim & Yun, 2007). Likewise, when the Swedish web
community LunarStorm refashioned itself as an SNS in 2000, it contained Friends lists,
guestbooks, and diary pages.

Ryze.com was the beginning of the next wave of SNSs, it was launched in 2001 to help
people control their business networks. Ryze's founder reports that he first introduced the
site to his friends, primarily members of the San Francisco business and technology
community, including the entrepreneurs and investors behind many future SNSs. In
particular, the people behind Ryze, Tribe.net, LinkedIn, and Friendster were tightly
interrelated personally and professionally. They believed that they could support each
other without competing (Festa, 2003). In the end, Ryze never acquired mass popularity,
Tribe.net grew to attract a passionate niche user base, LinkedIn became a powerful
business service, and Friendster became the most significant, if only as "one of the
biggest disappointments in Internet history" (Chafkin, 2007, p. 1).
Figure 1. Timeline of the launch dates of many major SNSs and dates when community
sites re-launched with SNS features
That was a brief history of the general SNSs. The following section discusses Friendster,
MySpace, and Facebook those are the three key SNSs that has shaped the business,
cultural, and research background.

The Rise (and Fall) of Friendster

Friendster launched in 2002 as a social complement to Ryze. It was designed to compete

with Match.com, a profitable online dating site (Cohen, 2003). While most dating sites
focused on introducing people to strangers with similar interests, Friendster was designed
to help friends-of-friends meet, based on the assumption that friends-of-friends would
make better romantic partners than would strangers. Friendster gained trust and grew to
300,000 users through word of mouth before traditional press coverage began in May
2003 (O'Shea, 2003).

As Friendster's popularity raised, the site encountered technical and social difficulties
(boyd, 2006b). Friendster's databases and servers were not well equipped to handle its
fast growth, and the site faded out regularly, the users who replaced email with Friendster
went frustrated.

Friendster began restricting the activities of its most obsessive users, because of its
growth. Starting with the organic growth that had been critical to creating a rational
community, the offensiveness of new users who learned about the site from media
coverage had upset the cultural balance. Then the exponential growth that meant a
collapse in the social framework, that is the users had to face their bosses, classmates
alongside with their close friends.

The initial design of Friendster restricted users from viewing profiles of people who were
more than four degrees away (friends-of-friends-of-friends-of-friends). In order to view
additional profiles, users began adding contacts and interesting-looking strangers to
expand their reach. Some began massively collecting Friends, an activity that was
implicitly encouraged through a "most popular" feature. The ultimate collectors were
fake profiles representing iconic fictional characters: celebrities, concepts, and other such
entities. These "Fakesters" outraged the company, who removed fake profiles and
eliminated the "most popular" feature. While few people actually created Fakesters, many
more enjoyed surfing Fakesters for entertainment or to find people they may knew.

The active deletion of Fakesters (and genuine users who chose non-realistic photos)
signaled to some that the company did not share users' interests. Many early adopters left
because of the combination of technical difficulties, social collisions, and a break of trust
between users and the site (boyd, 2006b). However, at the same time that it was fading in
the U.S., its popularity hit the stream in the Philippines, Singapore, Malaysia, and
Indonesia (Goldberg, 2007).

SNSs Hit the Mainstream

From 2003 onward, many new SNSs were launched, prompting social software analyst
Clay Shirky to make up the term YASNS: "Yet Another Social Networking Service."
(Shirky, 2003). Most took the form of profile-centric sites, trying to replicate the early
success of Friendster or target specific demographics. While socially-organized SNSs
solicit broad audiences, professional sites such as LinkedIn, Visible Path, and Xing
(formerly openBC) focus on business people. "Passion-centric" SNSs like Dogster help
strangers connect based on shared interests. Care2 helps activists meet, Couchsurfing
connects travelers to people with couches, and MyChurch joins Christian churches and
their members. Furthermore, as the social media and user-generated content phenomena
grew, websites focused on media sharing began implementing SNS features and
becoming SNSs themselves. Examples include Flickr (photo sharing), Last.FM (music
listening habits), and YouTube (video sharing).

With the excess of venture-backed startups launching in Silicon Valley, few people paid
attention to SNSs that gained popularity elsewhere, even those built by major
corporations. For example, Google's Orkut failed to build a sustainable U.S. user base,
but a "Brazilian invasion" (Fragoso, 2006) made Orkut the national SNS of Brazil.
Microsoft's Windows Live Spaces (a.k.a. MSN Spaces) also launched to lukewarm U.S.
reception but became extremely popular elsewhere.

Few analysts or journalists noticed when MySpace launched in Santa Monica, California,
hundreds of miles from Silicon Valley. MySpace was begun in 2003 to compete with
sites like Friendster, Xanga, and AsianAvenue. According to co-founder Tom Anderson,
the founders wanted to attract estranged Friendster users. After rumors emerged that
Friendster would adopt a fee-based system, users posted Friendster messages
encouraging people to join alternate SNSs, including Tribe.net and MySpace. Because of
this, MySpace was able to grow rapidly by capitalizing on Friendster's estrangement of
its early adopters. One particularly notable group that encouraged others to switch were
indie-rock bands who were expelled from Friendster for failing to comply with profile
regulations.

While MySpace was not launched with bands in mind, they were welcomed. Indie-rock
bands from the Los Angeles region began creating profiles, and local promoters used
MySpace to advertise VIP passes for popular clubs. MySpace contacted local musicians
to see how they could support them, bands were not the sole source of MySpace growth,
but the symbiotic relationship between bands and fans helped MySpace expand beyond
former Friendster users. The bands-and-fans dynamic was mutually beneficial: Bands
wanted to be able to contact fans, while fans desired attention from their favorite bands
and used Friend connections to signal identity and affiliation.
Futhermore, MySpace differentiated itself by regularly adding features based on user
demand (boyd, 2006b) and by allowing users to personalize their pages. This feature
emerged because MySpace did not restrict users from adding HTML into the forms that
framed their profiles; a copy/paste code culture emerged on the web to support users in
generating unique MySpace backgrounds and layouts (Perkel, 2006).

Teenagers began joining MySpace rapidly in 2004. Unlike older users, most teens were
never on Friendster, some joined because they wanted to connect with their favorite
bands; others were introduced to the site through older family members. As teens began
signing up, they encouraged their friends to join. Rather than rejecting underage users,
MySpace changed its user policy to allow minors. As the site grew, three distinct
populations began to form: musicians/artists, teenagers, and the post-college urban social
crowd. By and large, the latter two groups did not interact with one another except
through bands. Because of the lack of mainstream press coverage during 2004, few others
noticed the site's growing popularity.

Then, in July 2005, News Corporation purchased MySpace for $580 million (BBC,
2005), attracting massive media attention. Afterwards, safety issues plagued MySpace.
The site was implicated in a series of sexual interactions between adults and minors,
prompting legal action (Consumer Affairs, 2006). A moral panic concerning sexual
predators quickly spread (Bahney, 2006), although research suggests that the concerns
were exaggerated.

A Global Phenomenon

While MySpace attracted the majority of media attention in the U.S. and abroad, SNSs
were growing in popularity worldwide. Friendster gained traction in the Pacific Islands,
Orkut became the premier SNS in Brazil before growing rapidly in India (Madhavan,
2007), Mixi attained widespread adoption in Japan, LunarStorm took off in Sweden,
Dutch users embraced Hyves, Grono captured Poland, Hi5 was adopted in smaller
countries in Latin America, South America, and Europe, and Bebo became very popular
in the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Australia. Additionally, previously popular
communication and community services began implementing SNS features. The Chinese
QQ instant messaging service instantly became the largest SNS worldwide when it added
profiles and made friends visible (McLeod, 2006), while the forum tool Cyworld
cornered the Korean market by introducing homepages and buddies (Ewers, 2006).

Blogging services with complete SNS features also became popular. In the U.S., blogging
tools with SNS features, such as Xanga, LiveJournal, and Vox, attracted broad audiences.
Skyrock was leading in France, and Windows Live Spaces dominates numerous markets
worldwide, including in Mexico, Italy, and Spain. Although SNSs like QQ, Orkut, and
Live Spaces are just as large as, if not larger than, MySpace, they receive little coverage
in U.S. and English-speaking media, making it difficult to track their paths.

Expanding Niche Communities

Alongside these open services, other SNSs launched to support niche demographics
before expanding to a broader audience. Unlike previous SNSs, Facebook was designed
to support distinct college networks only. Facebook began in early 2004 as a Harvard-
only SNS (Cassidy, 2006). To join, a user had to have a harvard.edu email address. As
Facebook began supporting other schools, those users were also required to have
university email addresses associated with those institutions, a requirement that kept the
site relatively closed and contributed to users' perceptions of the site as an intimate,
private community.
Beginning in September 2005, Facebook expanded to include high school students,
professionals inside corporate networks, and, eventually, everyone. The change to open
signup did not mean that new users could easily access users in closed networks, gaining
access to corporate networks still required the appropriate .com address, while gaining
access to high school networks required administrator approval. Unlike other SNSs,
Facebook users are unable to make their full profiles public to all users. Another feature
that differentiates Facebook is the ability for outside developers to build “Applications”
which allow users to personalize their profiles and perform other tasks, such as compare
movie preferences and chart travel histories.

While most SNSs focus on growing broadly and exponentially, others explicitly seek
narrower audiences. Some, like aSmallWorld and BeautifulPeople, intentionally restrict
access to appear selective and elite. Others, activity-centered sites like Couchsurfing,
identity-driven sites like BlackPlanet, and affiliation-focused sites like MyChurch, are
limited by their target demographic and thus tend to be smaller. Finally, anyone who
wishes to create a niche social network site can do so on Ning, a platform and hosting
service that encourages users to create their own SNSs.

Currently, there are no reliable data regarding how many people use SNSs, although
marketing research indicates that SNSs are growing in popularity worldwide (comScore,
2007). This growth has prompted many corporations to invest time and money in
creating, purchasing, promoting, and advertising SNSs. At the same time, other
companies are blocking their employees from accessing the sites. Additionally, the U.S.
military banned soldiers from accessing MySpace (Frosch, 2007) and the Canadian
government prohibited employees from Facebook (Benzie, 2007), while the U.S.
Congress has proposed legislation to ban youth from accessing SNSs in schools and
libraries (H.R. 5319, 2006; S. 49, 2007).
The rise of SNSs indicates a shift in the organization of online communities. While
websites dedicated to communities of interest still exist and prosper, SNSs are primarily
organized around people, not interests. Early public online communities such as Usenet
and public discussion forums were structured by topics or according to topical
hierarchies, but social network sites are structured as personal networks, with the
individual at the center of their own community. This more accurately mirrors
unmediated social structures, where the world is composed of networks, not groups. The
introduction of SNS features has introduced a new organizational framework for online
communities, and with it, a vibrant new research context.

Previous Scholarship

Scholarship concerning SNSs is emerging from diverse disciplinary and methodological

traditions, addresses a range of topics, and builds on a large body of CMC research. The
goal of this section is to survey research that is directly concerned with social network
sites, and in so doing, to set the stage for the articles in this special issue. To date, the
bulk of SNS research has focused on impression management and friendship
performance, networks and network structure, online/offline connections, and privacy
issues.

Impression Management and Friendship Performance

Like other online contexts in which individuals are consciously able to construct an
online representation of self, such as online dating profiles, SNSs constitute an important
research context for scholars investigating processes of impression management, self-
presentation, and friendship performance. In one of the earliest academic articles on
SNSs, boyd (2004) examined Friendster as a place of publicly expressed social networks
that allowed users to negotiate presentations of self and connect with others. Donath and
boyd (2004) extended this to suggest that "public displays of connection" serve as
important identity signals that help people navigate the networked social world, in that an
extended network may serve to validate identity information presented in profiles.

While most sites encourage users to construct accurate representations of themselves,

participants do this to varying degrees. Marwick (2005) found that users on three
different SNSs had complex strategies for negotiating the rigidity of a prescribed
"authentic" profile, while boyd (2007) examined the phenomenon of "Fakesters" and
argued that profiles could never be real. The extent to which portraits are authentic or
playful varies across sites; both social and technological forces shape user practices.
(Skog, 2005) found that the status feature on LunarStorm strongly influenced how people
behaved and what they choose to reveal, profiles there indicate one's status as measured
by activity (e.g., sending messages) and indicators of authenticity (e.g., using a "real"
photo instead of a drawing).

Networks and Network Structure

Social network sites also provide rich sources of naturalistic behavioral data. Profile and
linkage data from SNSs can be gathered either through the use of automated collection
techniques or through datasets provided directly from the company, enabling network
analysis researchers to explore large-scale patterns of friending, usage, and other visible
indicators (Hogan, 2007), and continuing an analysis trend that started with examinations
of blogs and other websites. For instance, Golder, Wilkinson, and Huberman (2007)
examined an anonymized dataset consisting of 362 million messages exchanged by over
four million Facebook users for insight into Friending and messaging activities. Lampe,
Ellison, and Steinfield (2007) explored the relationship between profile elements and
number of Facebook friends, finding that profile fields that reduce transaction costs and
are harder to falsify are most likely to be associated with larger number of friendship
links. These kinds of data also lend themselves well to analysis through network
visualization (Adamic, Büyükkökten, & Adar, 2003; Heer & boyd, 2005; Paolillo &
Wright, 2005).

SNS researchers have also studied the network structure of Friendship. Analyzing the
roles people played in the growth of Flickr and Yahoo! 360's networks, (Kumar, Novak,
& Tomkins , 2006) argued that there are passive members, inviters, and linkers "who
fully participate in the social evolution of the network" (p. 1). Scholarship concerning
LiveJournal's network has included a Friendship classification scheme (Hsu, Lancaster,
Paradesi, & Weniger, 2007), an analysis of the role of language in the topology of
Friendship (Herring et al., 2007), research into the importance of geography in Friending
(Liben-Nowell, Novak, Kumar, Raghavan, & Tomkins, 2005), and studies on what
motivates people to join particular communities (Backstrom, Huttenlocher, Kleinberg, &
Lan, 2006). Based on Orkut data,(Spertus, Sahami, & Büyükkökten, 2005) identified a
topology of users through their membership in certain communities; they suggest that
sites can use this to recommend additional communities of interest to users. Finally, (Liu,
Maes, & Davenport, 2006) argued that Friend connections are not the only network
structure worth investigating. They examined the ways in which the performance of
tastes (favorite music, books, film, etc.) constitutes an alternate network structure, which
they call a "taste fabric."
Bridging Online and Offline Social Networks

Although exceptions exist, the available research suggests that most SNSs primarily
support pre-existing social relations. (Ellison, Steinfield, & Lampe, 2007) suggest that
Facebook is used to maintain existing offline relationships or solidify offline connections,
as opposed to meeting new people. These relationships may be weak ties, but typically
there is some common offline element among individuals who friend one another, such as
a shared class at school. This is one of the chief dimensions that differentiate SNSs from
earlier forms of public CMC such as newsgroups (Ellison et al., 2007). Research in this
vein has investigated how online interactions interface with offline ones. For instance,
(Lampe, Ellison, & Steinfield, 2006) found that Facebook users engage in "searching" for
people with whom they have an offline connection more than they "browse" for complete
strangers to meet. Likewise, Pew research found that 91% of U.S. teens who use SNSs do
so to connect with friends (Lenhart & Madden, 2007).

Given that SNSs enable individuals to connect with one another, it is not surprising that
they have become deeply embedded in user's lives. In Korea, Cyworld has become an
integral part of everyday life.(Choi, 2006) found that 85% of that study's respondents
"listed the maintenance and reinforcement of pre-existing social networks as their main
motive for Cyworld use". Likewise, (boyd, 2008) argues that MySpace and Facebook
enable U.S. youth to socialize with their friends even when they are unable to gather in
unmediated situations; she argues that SNSs are "networked publics" that support
sociability, just as unmediated public spaces do.

Privacy

Popular press coverage of SNSs has emphasized potential privacy concerns, primarily
concerning the safety of younger users (George, 2006; Kornblum & Marklein, 2006).
Researchers have investigated the potential threats to privacy associated with SNSs. In
one of the first academic studies of privacy and SNSs, (Gross and Acquisti, 2005)
analyzed 4,000 Carnegie Mellon University Facebook profiles and outlined the potential
threats to privacy contained in the personal information included on the site by students,
such as the potential ability to reconstruct users' social security numbers using
information often found in profiles, such as hometown and date of birth.

(Acquisti and Gross, 2006) argue that there is often a disconnect between students' desire
to protect privacy and their behaviors, a theme that is also explored in Stutzman's (2006)
survey of Facebook users and Barnes's (2006) description of the "privacy paradox" that
occurs when teens are not aware of the public nature of the Internet. In analyzing trust on
social network sites, Dwyer, Hiltz, and Passerini (2007) argued that trust and usage goals
may affect what people are willing to share. Facebook users expressed greater trust in
Facebook than MySpace users did in MySpace and thus were more willing to share
information on the site.

In another study examining security issues and SNSs, Jagatic, Johnson, Jakobsson, and
Menczer (2007) used freely accessible profile data from SNSs to craft a "phishing"
scheme that appeared to originate from a friend on the network; their targets were much
more likely to give away information to this "friend" than to a perceived stranger. Survey
data offer a more optimistic perspective on the issue, suggesting that teens are aware of
potential privacy threats online and that many are proactive about taking steps to
minimize certain potential risks. Pew found that 55% of online teens have profiles, 66%
of whom report that their profile is not visible to all Internet users (Lenhart & Madden,
2007). Of the teens with completely open profiles, 46% reported including at least some
false information.

Privacy is also implicated in users' ability to control impressions and manage social
contexts. Boyd (2008 a) asserted that Facebook's introduction of the "News Feed" feature
disrupted students' sense of control, even though data exposed through the feed were
previously accessible. Preibusch, Hoser, Gürses, and Berendt (2007) argued that the
privacy options offered by SNSs do not provide users with the flexibility they need to
handle conflicts with Friends who have different conceptions of privacy; they suggest a
framework for privacy in SNSs that they believe would help resolve these conflicts.

SNSs are also challenging legal conceptions of privacy. Hodge (2006) argued that the
fourth adjustment to the U.S. Constitution and legal decisions concerning privacy are not
equipped to address social network sites. For example, do police officers have the right to
access content posted to Facebook without a warrant? The legality of this hinges on users'
expectation of privacy and whether or not Facebook profiles are considered public or
private.

Bahrain and social networks emergence