Social media? It's serious! Understanding the dark side of social media

By Christian V. Baccarella, Timm F. Wagner, Jan H. Kietzmann, Ian Paul McCarthy. European Management Journal, 2018

405 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Research and practice have mostly focused on the “bright side” of social media, aiming to understand and help in leveraging the manifold opportunities afforded by this technology. However, it is increasingly observable that social media present enormous risks for individuals, communities, firms, and even for society as a whole. Examples for this “dark side” of social media include cyberbullying, addictive use, trolling, online witch hunts, fake news, and privacy abuse. In this article, we aim to illustrate the multidimensionality of the dark side of social media and describe the related various undesirable outcomes. To do this, we adapt the established social media honeycomb framework to explain the dark side implications of each of the seven functional building blocks: conversations, sharing, presence, relationships, reputation, groups, and identity. On the basis of these reflections, we present a number of avenues for future research, so as to facilitate a better understanding and use of social media.

Subfields: Communication, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3af7f000e000ca85af87d4357f8170859752daab

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Communication

1. Jan H. Kietzmann
2. Ian Paul McCarthy
3. Jaffar Abbas
4. Dorit Alt

In Sociology and Political Science

1. Jan H. Kietzmann
2. Ian Paul McCarthy
3. Mohammad Nurunnabi
4. Jaffar Abbas
5. Jaffar Aman
6. S. Bano
7. Dorit Alt

Citations in the corpus

• The Impact of Social Media on Learning Behavior for Sustainable Education: Evidence of Students from Selected Universities in Pakistan (2019, background): “Social media has changed the way its users communicate and utilize internet-based sites as a means of dispersing content among digital media and internet users [39,40].”
• Deepfakes: Trick or treat? (2020, methodology): “…with the tools and technology to create and post content (Kietzmann, Hermkens, McCarthy, & Silvestre, 2011; Kietzmann, Silvestre, McCarthy, & Pit, 2012) make it very easy to distribute deepfakes – one of the many dark sides of social media (Baccarella, Wagner, Kietzmann, & McCarthy, 2018).”