The devil is in the details: factors modulating the effectiveness of narrative privacy education video interventions

Social media interdependent privacy (IDP) violations involve users sharing information and media about others without consent. While psychosocial interventions have been proposed to increase awareness and reduce violations, prior research shows mixed results regarding the effectiveness of different intervention designs. We recruited 625 participants to test the effects of the following design elements in narrative-based privacy education videos: narrative perspective (third-person vs. first-person) and risk of consequences (low vs. high). We also tested intervention effectiveness based on individual (social media disorder; SMD) and image content (more-or-less private) differences. The interventions reduced the sharing of especially sensitive images compared to the control, but they impacted people and the types of content shared differently. In terms of individual differences, people with disordered social media use were more influenced by first-person narratives than third-person narratives, especially first-person narratives of everyday ‘low-risk’ violations. In contrast, people low in social media disorder were more impacted after relatively ‘high-risk’ third-person narratives, which was the least effective intervention for people high in social media disorder. The findings demonstrate the importance of presenting diverse examples in the privacy education sphere in order to target diverse user types, where failure to take into account psychological aspects can result in the intervention backfiring.