Cybersecurity Challenges in Social Media Erdal Ozkaya

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Research question design 
The research questions were aimed at gathering data and spreading awareness about 
social media security and privacy. The primal focus was on data collection, where user 
characteristics, security awareness, and social media usage patterns were studied. The 
respondents’ age, level of education, computer literacy, and gender gave the basic 
characteristics needed for the research. Questions on their favorite social media platforms, 
frequency of use of social media platforms, and number of friends or followers were used to 
gauge their social media usage tendencies. This would be effective at profiling them to the 
type of security and privacy risks that they would be facing. 
There were questions on the respondents’ awareness of existing privacy issues on 
social media, their encounters with social media issues, their thoughts on privacy controls, the 
names they used on social media, their privacy settings, knowledge of social media privacy 
policies, and changing the default data collection settings. These were aimed at finding out 
the social media privacy awareness of users. The questionnaire included questions on the 
respondents’ views on platforms that were too aggressive, used deceptive tactics to gather 
data, had poor user support, and were selling data to third parties. These questions not only 
collected data but also enlightened users on the prevailing issues on social media. If users had 
not been aware of such issues, these questions would spark interest in them. Finally, the 
research questions also tried to get the respondents’ opinions on the possible mitigation 
measures to social media security and privacy issues. The respondents were thus asked on 
their views on the practicality of the involvement of governments to control social media 
platforms and punish platforms that would violate privacy of users through fines and 
censorship. 

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