Sharenting on Instagram and Children's Privacy Gatekeeping

Abstract

This study aims to identify parents’ motivations to do sharenting on Instagram. Also, it studies the way that parents feel responsible about the different examples of children’s privacy violations on this social media site. Different types of sharenting, children’s privacy, privacy in the networked society, children’s online security, social benefits of sharenting, economic motivations, privacy stewardship, privacy calculus theory, and the emergence of moral phobia have been explored. 267 parents (mother/father) have been interviewed by an online questionnaire through convenient and snowball sampling. “Connection to family and friends”, “making online albums” and “sharing the pleasant feelings due to children’s attractive activities with the others” are the most important motivations of parents to sharent. Also based on the model of the study and factor analysis, the examples of privacy violations have been divided into “very sensitive” and “common” types. The findings show that there is a direct correlation between the parent's education and the way they react to privacy violation examples. In other words, the more they are educated, the more they care about their children’s privacy. Furthermore, the parents who have given a thought to probable risks of sharenting are much more sensitive to the examples of privacy violations.

Keywords

• "sharenting"
• "children’s privacy"
• "privacy calculus"
• "children’s privacy stewardship"
• "privacy gatekeeping"