Security and privacy practices of end-users on social media are an important area of research, as well as a top-of-mind concern for individuals as well as organizations. In recent years, we have seen a sharp increase in data breaches and cyber security threats that have targeted social media users. Hence, it is imperative that we try to better understand factors that affect an end-user’s adoption of effective security safeguards and privacy protection practices. In this research, we propose and validate a theoretical model that posits several determinants of end-user security and privacy practices on social media. We hypothesize relationships among various cognitive, affective and behavioral factors identified under the themes of posture, proficiency, and practices. These constructs and hypotheses are validated through empirical research comprising an online survey questionnaire, and structural equation modeling (SEM) analysis. The key findings of this study highlight the importance of cyber threat awareness and social media security and privacy self-efficacy, which have a direct impact on end-user security and privacy practices. Additionally, our research shows that use of general technology applications for security and privacy impacts the adoption of security and privacy practices on social media. In totality, our research findings indicate that proficiency is a better predictor or security and privacy practices as compared to the posture of an end-user. Factors such as privacy disposition, privacy concerns, and perceived risk of privacy violations do not have as significant or direct effect on security and privacy practices. Based on our research findings, we provide some key take-aways in the form of theoretical contributions, suggestions for future research, as well as recommendations for organizational security awareness training programs.

Many traditional Internet forums have not adapted to the development of the web and their usability standard is low. In order to satisfy this unexplored market segment Zoorum AB is working on a project with the goal to develop a new kind of Internet application for topic oriented discussions. The goal of this master thesis is to design a usable Internet forum, in association with Zoorum AB and Teknikhuset AB. Our challenge was to manage the designprocess, contribute with competence in interaction and usability and functionas a connection between the technology and the users. The result is presented as guidelines for design and visualized in the shape of mock-ups.

The retail banks are usually looked upon as conservative. Since the launch of internet banks in the 90's they have not developed much. Meanwhile the internet is developing in a fast pace and social websites are increasing in popularity. The purpose of this essay was to investigate how internet banking will develop in the near future based on interviews, literature and trend studies. With web 2.0 techniques the internet bank could develop to help the costumers take more informed decisions regarding their economic situation. Banks should start by giving the customers better service through budgeting tools and graphical overviews. It is crucial that the layout and usability of the internet banks improve since the customers find it hard to find information. Customers want the bank to help them with a larger portion of thie economy through targeted advice based on information the bank have about the customers spendings, savings, habits and income. The bank could offer comparisons between different electricity companies, insurance companies and other things that greatly affect the personal economy. In addition to this, an anonymous comparison of the statistics of customers in simular situations is of interest to the customers as well as comparisons of different banks services. Furthermore, a niche community for people with specific interest in economics holds potential for the banking industry. A community for private customers on the other hand is not an alternative since the costumers prefer other forms of communities.

As Facebook grows beyond a billion users (Zuckerberg, 2012), a decreasing percentage of those users are English-only speakers. Facebook provides a platform for multilingual conversation to occur, which requires that Facebook display non-Latin scripts. Because of the hegemony of English and the Latin alphabet on the Web, non-Latin scripts are often “ASCII-ized.” Displaying non-Latin scripts well facilitates communication for multilingual users and creates a place where they can explore their identity linguistically as they post on Facebook. This study examines what factors contribute to multilingual Facebook users making linguistic posting choices. Many have named Facebook as a successful multilingual Web site, thus it is reasonable to expect that Facebook is an exemplar of multilingual social networking sites. This study is an examination and critique of Facebook’s multilingual translations. To address questions of how Facebook’s interface facilitates or impedes multilingual conversation, the researcher recruited twelve active, multilingual Facebook users to participate in individual interviews and a small focus group. Besides English, these users spoke and posted in the world’s four other most widely spoken languages: Chinese, Spanish, Arabic and Hindi. The researcher found that multilingual Facebook users did not always have a choice in what language they would post. Users faced obstacles ranging from the Facebook app distorting script display to hardware bias limiting users’ text entry. Furthermore, participants’ linguistic presentation was not dichotomous between two languages; multilingual users and their friends are accustomed to operating in a multilingual space. The larger implication of these findings is that Facebook, despite pioneering massive translation projects, has not solved the problem of linguistic representation for social networking sites. Facebook’s solution is not scalable to less widely spoken languages because even languages with many millions of speakers, such as Spanish, have flawed implementations on Facebook. / text

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In this thesis the structure and usage of narrative within a social media platform isexplored, with Twitter as the chosen social media network. Narrative and storytellingwithin a social media sphere such as Twitter primarily focuses on bringing a certaincharacterization and voice to a user account with story and narrative generally coming insecond place. By studying and comparing real-life cases of storytelling on twitter I havecome to the conclusion that a narrative structure that combines a good character with awell-executed characterization is the ideal way of using Twitter as a platform forstorytelling.

Crowdsourcing systems - like Ushahidi (for crisis mapping), Foldit (for protein folding) and Duolingo (for foreign language learning and translation) - have shown the effectiveness of intelligently organizing large numbers of people to solve traditionally vexing problems. Unfortunately, new crowdsourcing platforms are emerging to support the coordinated dissemination of spam, misinformation, and propaganda. These “crowdturfing” systems are a sinister counterpart to the enormous positive opportunities of crowdsourcing; they combine the organizational capabilities of crowdsourcing with the ability to widely spread artificial grass root support (so called “astroturfing”). This thesis begins a study of crowdturfing that targets social media and proposes a framework for “pulling back the curtain” on crowdturfers to reveal their underlying ecosystem. Concretely, this thesis (i) analyzes the types of campaigns hosted on multiple crowdsourcing sites; (ii) links campaigns and their workers on crowdsourcing sites to social media; (iii) analyzes the relationship structure connecting these workers, their profile, activity, and linguistic characteristics, in comparison with a random sample of regular social media users; and (iv) proposes and develops statistical user models to automatically identify crowdturfers in social media. Since many crowdturfing campaigns are hidden, it is important to understand the potential of learning models from known campaigns to detect these unknown campaigns. Our experimental results show that the statistical user models built can predict crowdturfers with very high accuracy.

Purpose - With the social media's emergence in recent times, the main purpose of this study is to generate knowledge about social media communication’s impact on consumer-based brand equity, in terms of firm-created and user-generated social media communication. In order to make this possible, knowledge about customer’s perception about a specific brand is required. Furthermore, we are interested in explaining issues concerning how fashion companies can efficiently use social media, and the study’s intention is also to present recommendations of how companies can use social media as a marketing communication tool. Theory and hypothesis – This chapter deals with theory about consumer-based brand equity, where the different components of the model are presented. Also theory about social media, different social media applications and a social media strategy are described. Finally, firm- created and user-generated social media communications impact on brand equity are discussed, which leads to the study’s hypotheses. Methodology – The study has a triangulation consisting of both a qualitative and a quantitative part and has essentially a deductive approach. The study interviewed one expert in the fashion industry and one expert in the area of social media. An interview with the analysed company’s marketing manager was also made. The quantitative study was made on 624 respondents, which were all members of the company’s customer club. 97 of these 624 respondents were investigated in order to observe the impact of firm-created and user- generated social media communication on brand equity. Empirical findings and results – The findings in the study indicate that firm-created social media communication positively impact brand equity, while user-generated did not show to be significant. In this study it was shown that the majority of the respondents use social media, especially Facebook, and the content that most valuable was access to discounts and promotions as well as information about the brand and its products. Conclusion - Our study confirms the importance for companies to use social media as a marketing tool and it should be in all managers’ interest to make use of this channel. Also the importance of having high brand equity is highlighted and how the customer’s perceptions about a brand can be used as guidelines in order to increase brand equity.

This paper examines how recruiters use social media during their recruitment process. The paper focuses on the staffing industry and will further examine how recruiters are handling jobseekers personal privacy when they are using social media in a recruitment process. The paper are trying to understand the meaning of what personal integrity means and how or if recruiters show consideration to this in a recruitment process when they are using social media as a recruitment tool.   Our result demonstrates that, today recruiters use social media daily to conduct background checks on job applicants. There are no clear instructions and rules on how recruiters should handle background checks through social media. Recruiters believe that job seekers are responsible for the information contained on the their social media. Recruiters do not see anything wrong with their actions when they choose to do background checks on job applicants through social media. If we look at the factors that violates an individual's privacy, can we conclude that recruits approach could be classified as a violation of jobseekers' personal integrity.