privacy media case study

United States: Case Studies: High-Profile Cases of Privacy Violation

Case Studies: Recent FTC Enforcement Actions - High-Profile Cases of Privacy Violation: Uber, Emp Media, Lenovo, Vizio, VTech, LabMD

Uber Technologies

The scenario: In August 2018, the FTC announced an expanded settlement with Uber Technologies for its alleged failure to reasonably secure sensitive data in the cloud, resulting in a data breach of 600,000 names and driver's license numbers, 22 million names and phone numbers, and more than 25 million names and email addresses.

The settlement: The expanded settlement is a result of Uber's failure to disclose a significant data breach that occurred in 2016 while the FTC was conducting its investigation that led to the original settlement. The revised proposed order includes provisions requiring Uber to disclose any future consumer data breaches, submit all reports for third-party audits of Uber's privacy policy and retain reports on unauthorized access to consumer data. 2

Emp Media Inc. (Myex.com)

The scenario: The FTC joined forces with the State of Nevada to address privacy issues arising from the "revenge" pornography website, Myex.com, run by Emp Media Inc. The website allowed individuals to submit intimate photos of the victims, including personal information such as name, address, phone number and social media accounts. If a victim wanted their photos and information removed from the website, the defendants reportedly charged fees of $499 to $2,800 to do so.

The settlement: On June 15, 2018, the enforcement action brought by the FTC led to a shutdown of the website and permanently prohibited the defendants from posting intimate photos and personal information of other individuals without their consent. The defendants were also ordered to pay more than $2 million. 3

Lenovo and Vizio

The scenario: In 2018, FTC enforcement actions led to large settlements with technology manufacturers Lenovo and Vizio. The Lenovo settlement related to allegations the company sold computers in the U.S. with pre-installed software that sent consumer information to third parties without the knowledge of the users. With the New Jersey Office of Attorney General, the FTC also brought an enforcement action against Vizio, a manufacturer of "smart" televisions. Vizio entered into a settlement to resolve allegations it installed software on its televisions to collect consumer data without the knowledge or consent of consumers and sold the data to third parties.

The settlement: Lenovo entered into a consent agreement to resolve the allegations through a decision and order issued by the FTC. The company was ordered to obtain affirmative consent from consumers before running the software on their computers and implement a software security program on preloaded software for the next 20 years. 4 Vizio agreed to pay $2.2 million, delete the collected data, disclose all data collection and sharing practices, obtain express consent from consumers to collect or share their data, and implement a data security program. 5

The scenario: The FTC's action against toy manufacturer VTech was the first time the FTC became involved in a children's privacy and security matter. The settlement: In January 2018, the company entered into a settlement to pay $650,000 to resolve allegations it collected personal information from children without obtaining parental consent, in violation of COPPA. VTech was also required to implement a data security program that is subject to audits for the next 20 years. 6

The scenario: LabMD, a cancer-screening company, was accused by the FTC of failing to reasonably protect consumers' medical information and other personal data. Identity thieves allegedly obtained sensitive data on LabMD consumers due to the company's failure to properly safeguard it. The billing information of 9,000 consumers was also compromised. The settlement: After years of litigation, the case was heard before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. LabMD argued, in part, that data security falls outside of the FTC's mandate over unfair practices. The Eleventh Circuit issued a decision in June 2018 that, while not stripping the FTC of authority to police data security, did challenge the remedy imposed by the FTC. 7 The court ruled that the cease-and-desist order issued by the FTC against LabMD was unenforceable because the order required the company to implement a data security program that needed to adhere to a standard of "reasonableness" that was too vague. 8

The ruling points to the need for the FTC to provide greater specificity in its cease-and-desist orders about what is required by companies that allegedly fail to safeguard consumer data.

1 15 U.S.C. § 45(a)(1)

2 www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2018/04/uber-agrees-expanded-settlement-ftc-related-privacy-security

3 www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/cases/emp_order_granting_default_judgment_6-22-18.pdf

4 www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2018/01/ftc-gives-final-approval-lenovo-settlement

5 www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2017/02/vizio-pay-22-million-ftc-state-newjersey-settle-charges-it

6 www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2018/01/electronic-toy-maker-vtech-settlesftc-allegations-it-violated

7 The United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit has rejected this argument. See FTC v. Wyndham Worldwide Corp., 799 F.3d 236, 247-49 (2015).

8 www.media.ca11.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/files/201616270.pdf

The content of this article is intended to provide a general guide to the subject matter. Specialist advice should be sought about your specific circumstances.

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The Battle for Digital Privacy Is Reshaping the Internet

As Apple and Google enact privacy changes, businesses are grappling with the fallout, Madison Avenue is fighting back and Facebook has cried foul.

By Brian X. Chen

Listen to This Article

SAN FRANCISCO — Apple introduced a pop-up window for iPhones in April that asks people for their permission to be tracked by different apps.

Google recently outlined plans to disable a tracking technology in its Chrome web browser.

And Facebook said last month that hundreds of its engineers were working on a new method of showing ads without relying on people’s personal data.

The developments may seem like technical tinkering, but they were connected to something bigger: an intensifying battle over the future of the internet. The struggle has entangled tech titans, upended Madison Avenue and disrupted small businesses. And it heralds a profound shift in how people’s personal information may be used online, with sweeping implications for the ways that businesses make money digitally.

At the center of the tussle is what has been the internet’s lifeblood: advertising .

More than 20 years ago, the internet drove an upheaval in the advertising industry. It eviscerated newspapers and magazines that had relied on selling classified and print ads, and threatened to dethrone television advertising as the prime way for marketers to reach large audiences.

Instead, brands splashed their ads across websites, with their promotions often tailored to people’s specific interests. Those digital ads powered the growth of Facebook, Google and Twitter, which offered their search and social networking services to people without charge. But in exchange, people were tracked from site to site by technologies such as “ cookies, ” and their personal data was used to target them with relevant marketing.

Now that system, which ballooned into a $350 billion digital ad industry, is being dismantled. Driven by online privacy fears, Apple and Google have started revamping the rules around online data collection. Apple, citing the mantra of privacy, has rolled out tools that block marketers from tracking people. Google, which depends on digital ads, is trying to have it both ways by reinventing the system so it can continue aiming ads at people without exploiting access to their personal data.

If personal information is no longer the currency that people give for online content and services, something else must take its place. Media publishers, app makers and e-commerce shops are now exploring different paths to surviving a privacy-conscious internet, in some cases overturning their business models. Many are choosing to make people pay for what they get online by levying subscription fees and other charges instead of using their personal data.

Jeff Green, the chief executive of the Trade Desk, an ad-technology company in Ventura, Calif., that works with major ad agencies, said the behind-the-scenes fight was fundamental to the nature of the web.

“The internet is answering a question that it’s been wrestling with for decades, which is: How is the internet going to pay for itself?” he said.

The fallout may hurt brands that relied on targeted ads to get people to buy their goods. It may also initially hurt tech giants like Facebook — but not for long. Instead, businesses that can no longer track people but still need to advertise are likely to spend more with the largest tech platforms, which still have the most data on consumers.

David Cohen, chief executive of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, a trade group, said the changes would continue to “drive money and attention to Google, Facebook, Twitter.”

The shifts are complicated by Google’s and Apple’s opposing views on how much ad tracking should be dialed back. Apple wants its customers, who pay a premium for its iPhones, to have the right to block tracking entirely. But Google executives have suggested that Apple has turned privacy into a privilege for those who can afford its products.

For many people, that means the internet may start looking different depending on the products they use. On Apple gadgets, ads may be only somewhat relevant to a person’s interests, compared with highly targeted promotions inside Google’s web. Website creators may eventually choose sides, so some sites that work well in Google’s browser might not even load in Apple’s browser, said Brendan Eich, a founder of Brave, the private web browser.

“It will be a tale of two internets,” he said.

Businesses that do not keep up with the changes risk getting run over. Increasingly, media publishers and even apps that show the weather are charging subscription fees, in the same way that Netflix levies a monthly fee for video streaming. Some e-commerce sites are considering raising product prices to keep their revenues up.

Consider Seven Sisters Scones, a mail-order pastry shop in Johns Creek, Ga., which relies on Facebook ads to promote its items. Nate Martin, who leads the bakery’s digital marketing, said that after Apple blocked some ad tracking, its digital marketing campaigns on Facebook became less effective. Because Facebook could no longer get as much data on which customers like baked goods, it was harder for the store to find interested buyers online.

“Everything came to a screeching halt,” Mr. Martin said. In June, the bakery’s revenue dropped to $16,000 from $40,000 in May.

Sales have since remained flat, he said. To offset the declines, Seven Sisters Scones has discussed increasing prices on sampler boxes to $36 from $29.

Apple declined to comment, but its executives have said advertisers will adapt. Google said it was working on an approach that would protect people’s data but also let advertisers continue targeting users with ads.

Since the 1990s, much of the web has been rooted in digital advertising. In that decade, a piece of code planted in web browsers — the “cookie” — began tracking people’s browsing activities from site to site. Marketers used the information to aim ads at individuals, so someone interested in makeup or bicycles saw ads about those topics and products.

After the iPhone and Android app stores were introduced in 2008, advertisers also collected data about what people did inside apps by planting invisible trackers. That information was linked with cookie data and shared with data brokers for even more specific ad targeting.

The result was a vast advertising ecosystem that underpinned free websites and online services. Sites and apps like BuzzFeed and TikTok flourished using this model. Even e-commerce sites rely partly on advertising to expand their businesses.

But distrust of these practices began building. In 2018, Facebook became embroiled in the Cambridge Analytica scandal, where people’s Facebook data was improperly harvested without their consent. That same year, European regulators enacted the General Data Protection Regulation , laws to safeguard people’s information. In 2019, Google and Facebook agreed to pay record fines to the Federal Trade Commission to settle allegations of privacy violations.

In Silicon Valley, Apple reconsidered its advertising approach. In 2017, Craig Federighi, Apple’s head of software engineering, announced that the Safari web browser would block cookies from following people from site to site.

“It kind of feels like you’re being tracked, and that’s because you are,” Mr. Federighi said. “No longer.”

Last year, Apple announced the pop-up window in iPhone apps that asks people if they want to be followed for marketing purposes. If the user says no, the app must stop monitoring and sharing data with third parties.

That prompted an outcry from Facebook , which was one of the apps affected. In December, the social network took out full-page newspaper ads declaring that it was “standing up to Apple” on behalf of small businesses that would get hurt once their ads could no longer find specific audiences.

“The situation is going to be challenging for them to navigate,” Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, said.

Facebook is now developing ways to target people with ads using insights gathered on their devices, without allowing personal data to be shared with third parties. If people who click on ads for deodorant also buy sneakers, Facebook can share that pattern with advertisers so they can show sneaker ads to that group. That would be less intrusive than sharing personal information like email addresses with advertisers.

“We support giving people more control over how their data is used, but Apple’s far-reaching changes occurred without input from the industry and those who are most impacted,” a Facebook spokesman said.

Since Apple released the pop-up window, more than 80 percent of iPhone users have opted out of tracking worldwide, according to ad tech firms. Last month, Peter Farago, an executive at Flurry, a mobile analytics firm owned by Verizon Media, published a post on LinkedIn calling the “time of death” for ad tracking on iPhones.

At Google, Sundar Pichai, the chief executive, and his lieutenants began discussing in 2019 how to provide more privacy without killing the company’s $135 billion online ad business. In studies, Google researchers found that the cookie eroded people’s trust. Google said its Chrome and ad teams concluded that the Chrome web browser should stop supporting cookies.

But Google also said it would not disable cookies until it had a different way for marketers to keep serving people targeted ads. In March, the company tried a method that uses its data troves to place people into groups based on their interests, so marketers can aim ads at those cohorts rather than at individuals. The approach is known as Federated Learning of Cohorts, or FLOC.

Plans remain in flux. Google will not block trackers in Chrome until 2023 .

Even so, advertisers said they were alarmed.

In an article this year, Sheri Bachstein, the head of IBM Watson Advertising, warned that the privacy shifts meant that relying solely on advertising for revenue was at risk. Businesses must adapt, she said, including by charging subscription fees and using artificial intelligence to help serve ads.

“The big tech companies have put a clock on us,” she said in an interview.

Kate Conger contributed reporting.

Brian X. Chen is the lead consumer technology writer for The Times. He reviews products and writes Tech Fix , a column about the social implications of the tech we use. Before joining The Times in 2011, he reported on Apple and the wireless industry for Wired. More about Brian X. Chen

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Americans’ complicated feelings about social media in an era of privacy concerns

Amid public concerns over Cambridge Analytica’s use of Facebook data and a subsequent movement to encourage users to abandon Facebook , there is a renewed focus on how social media companies collect personal information and make it available to marketers.

Pew Research Center has studied the spread and impact of social media since 2005, when just 5% of American adults used the platforms. The trends tracked by our data tell a complex story that is full of conflicting pressures. On one hand, the rapid growth of the platforms is testimony to their appeal to online Americans. On the other, this widespread use has been accompanied by rising user concerns about privacy and social media firms’ capacity to protect their data.

All this adds up to a mixed picture about how Americans feel about social media. Here are some of the dynamics.

People like and use social media for several reasons

About seven-in-ten American adults (69%) now report they use some kind of social media platform (not including YouTube) – a nearly fourteenfold increase since Pew Research Center first started asking about the phenomenon. The growth has come across all demographic groups and includes 37% of those ages 65 and older.

The Center’s polls have found over the years that people use social media for important social interactions like staying in touch with friends and family and reconnecting with old acquaintances. Teenagers are especially likely to report that social media are important to their friendships and, at times, their romantic relationships .

Beyond that, we have documented how social media play a role in the way people participate in civic and political activities, launch and sustain protests , get and share health information , gather scientific information , engage in family matters , perform job-related activities and get news . Indeed, social media is now just as common a pathway to news for people as going directly to a news organization website or app.

Our research has not established a causal relationship between people’s use of social media and their well-being. But in a 2011 report, we noted modest associations between people’s social media use and higher levels of trust, larger numbers of close friends, greater amounts of social support and higher levels of civic participation.

People worry about privacy and the use of their personal information

While there is evidence that social media works in some important ways for people, Pew Research Center studies have shown that people are anxious about all the personal information that is collected and shared and the security of their data.

Overall, a 2014 survey found that 91% of Americans “agree” or “strongly agree” that people have lost control over how personal information is collected and used by all kinds of entities. Some 80% of social media users said they were concerned about advertisers and businesses accessing the data they share on social media platforms, and 64% said the government should do more to regulate advertisers.

Another survey last year found that just 9% of social media users were “very confident” that social media companies would protect their data . About half of users were not at all or not too confident their data were in safe hands.

Moreover, people struggle to understand the nature and scope of the data collected about them. Just 9% believe they have “a lot of control” over the information that is collected about them, even as the vast majority (74%) say it is very important to them to be in control of who can get information about them.

Six-in-ten Americans (61%) have said they would like to do more to protect their privacy. Additionally, two-thirds have said current laws are not good enough in protecting people’s privacy, and 64% support more regulation of advertisers.

Some privacy advocates hope that the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation , which goes into effect on May 25, will give users – even Americans – greater protections about what data tech firms can collect, how the data can be used, and how consumers can be given more opportunities to see what is happening with their information.

People’s issues with the social media experience go beyond privacy

In addition to the concerns about privacy and social media platforms uncovered in our surveys, related research shows that just 5% of social media users trust the information that comes to them via the platforms “a lot.”

Moreover, social media users can be turned off by what happens on social media. For instance, social media sites are frequently cited as places where people are harassed . Near the end of the 2016 election campaign, 37% of social media users said they were worn out by the political content they encountered, and large shares said social media interactions with those opposed to their views were stressful and frustrating. Large shares also said that social media interactions related to politics were less respectful, less conclusive, less civil and less informative than offline interactions.

A considerable number of social media users said they simply ignored  political arguments when they broke out in their feeds. Others went steps further by blocking or unfriending those who offended or bugged them.

Why do people leave or stay on social media platforms?

The paradox is that people use social media platforms even as they express great concern about the privacy implications of doing so – and the social woes they encounter. The Center’s most recent survey about social media found that 59% of users said it would  not be difficult to give up these sites, yet the share saying these sites would be hard to give up grew 12 percentage points from early 2014.

Some of the answers about why people stay on social media could tie to our findings about how people adjust their behavior on the sites and online, depending on personal and political circumstances. For instance, in a 2012 report we found that 61% of Facebook users said they had taken a break from using the platform. Among the reasons people cited were that they were too busy to use the platform, they lost interest, they thought it was a waste of time and that it was filled with too much drama, gossip or conflict.

In other words, participation on the sites for many people is not an all-or-nothing proposition.

People pursue strategies to try to avoid problems on social media and the internet overall. Fully 86% of internet users said in 2012 they had taken steps to try to be anonymous online. “Hiding from advertisers” was relatively high on the list of those they wanted to avoid.

Many social media users fine-tune their behavior to try to make things less challenging or unsettling on the sites, including changing their privacy settings and restricting access to their profiles. Still, 48% of social media users reported in a 2012 survey they have difficulty managing their privacy controls.

After National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden disclosed details about government surveillance programs starting in 2013, 30% of adults said they took steps to hide or shield their information and 22% reported they had changed their online behavior in order to minimize detection.

One other argument that some experts make in Pew Research Center canvassings about the future is that people often find it hard to disconnect because so much of modern life takes place on social media. These experts believe that unplugging is hard because social media and other technology affordances make life convenient and because the platforms offer a very efficient, compelling way for users to stay connected to the people and organizations that matter to them.

Note: See topline results  for overall social media user data   here (PDF).

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Lee Rainie is director of internet and technology research at Pew Research Center

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Top 10 Privacy and Data Protection Cases of 2018: a selection

• Cliff Richard v. The British Broadcasting Corporation [2018] EWHC 1837 (Ch) .

This was Sir Cliff Richard’s privacy claim against the BBC and was the highest profile privacy of the year.  The claimant was awarded damages of £210,000. We had a case preview and case reports on each day of the trial and posts from a number of commentators including Paul Wragg , Thomas Bennett ( first and second ), Jelena Gligorijević . The BBC subsequently announced that it would not seek permission to appeal.

• ABC v Telegraph Media Group Ltd [2018] EWCA Civ 2329 .

This was perhaps the second most discussed privacy case of the year.  The Court of Appeal allowed the claimants’ appeal and granted an interim injunction to prevent the publication of confidential information about alleged “discreditable conduct” by a high profile executive.  Lord Hain subsequently named the executive as Sir Philip Green.  We had a case comment from Persephone Bridgman Baker. We also had comments criticising Lord Hain’s conduct from Paul Wragg , Robert Craig and Tom Double .

• Ali v Channel 5 Broadcast ( [2018] EWHC 298 (Ch)) .

The claimants had featured in a “reality TV” programme about bailiffs, “Can’t pay? We’ll Take it Away”. Their claim for misuse of private information was successful and damages of £20,000 were awarded. We had a case comment from Zoe McCallum. An appeal and cross appeal was heard on 4 December 2018 and judgment is awaited.

• NT1 and NT2 v Google Inc [2018] 3 WLR 1165.

This was the first “right to be forgotten” claim in the English Courts – with claims in both data protection and privacy. Both claimants had spent convictions – one was successful and the other not.  We had a case preview from Aidan Wills and a comment on the case from Iain Wilson,

• Lloyd v Google LLC [2018] EWHC 2599 (QB) .

This was an attempt to bring a “representative action” in data protection on behalf of all iPhone users in respect of the “Safari Workaround”. The representative claimant was refused permission to serve Google out of the jurisdiction.  We had a case comment from Rosalind English.  There was a Panopticon Blog post the case. The claimant has been given permission to appeal and it is likely that the appeal will be heard in late 2019.

• TLU v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2018] EWCA Civ 2217 .

The Court of Appeal dismissed an appeal in a “data leak” case on the issue of liability to individuals affected by a data leak but not specifically named in the leaked document. We had a case comment from Lorna Skinner and further comment from Iain Wilson.  There was also a Panopticon Blog post .

• Stunt v Associated Newspapers [2018] EWCA Civ 170 .

The Court of Appeal referred the question of whether the “journalistic exemption” in section 32(4) of the Data Protection Act 1998 is compatible with the Data Protection Directive and the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights to the CJEU.  There was a Panopticon Blog post on the case.

• Various Claimants v W M Morrison Supermarkets plc [2018] EWCA Civ 2339 .

The Court of Appeal upheld the decision of Langstaff J that Morrisons were vicariously liable for a mass data breach caused by the criminal act of a rogue employee. We had a case comment from Alex Cochrane.  There was a Panopticon Blog post the case.

• Big Brother Watch v. Secretary of State [2018] ECHR 722 .

An important case in which the European Court of Human Rights held that secret surveillance regimes including the bulk interception of external communications violated Articles 8 and 10 of the Convention. We had a post by Graham Smith as to the implications of this decision for the present regime.

• ML and WW v Germany ( [2018] ECHR 554 ). 

This was the first case in the European Court of Human Rights on the “right to be forgotten”. This was an application under Article in respect of the historic publication by the media of information concerning a murder conviction.  The application was dismissed.  We had a case comment from Hugh Tomlinson and Aidan Wills.  There was also a Panopticon blog post on the case.

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2018 Top 10 Privacy and Data Protection Cases

January 29, 2019 at 6:25 am

Reblogged this on | truthaholics and commented: “In this post we round up some of the most legally and factually interesting privacy and data protection cases from England and Europe from the past year.”

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Reblogged this on tummum's Blog .

February 2, 2019 at 12:27 am

Very Nice and informative data…keep the good work going on

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Research on the influence mechanism of privacy invasion experiences with privacy protection intentions in social media contexts: Regulatory focus as the moderator

1 School of Journalism and Communication, Xiamen University, Xiamen, China

2 Research Center for Intelligent Society and Social Governance, Interdisciplinary Research Institute, Zhejiang Lab, Hangzhou, China

Associated Data

The original contributions presented in the study are included in the article/ Supplementary material , further inquiries can be directed to the corresponding author.

Introduction

In recent years, there have been numerous online privacy violation incidents caused by the leakage of personal information of social media users, yet there seems to be a tendency for users to burn out when it comes to privacy protection, which leads to more privacy invasions and forms a vicious circle. Few studies have examined the impact of social media users' privacy invasion experiences on their privacy protection intention. Protection motivation theory has often been applied to privacy protection research. However, it has been suggested that the theory could be improved by introducing individual emotional factors, and empirical research in this area is lacking.

To fill these gaps, the current study constructs a moderated chain mediation model based on protection motivation theory and regulatory focus theory, and introduces privacy fatigue as an emotional variable.

Results and discussion

An analysis of a sample of 4800 from China finds that: (1) Social media users' previous privacy invasion experiences can increase their privacy protection intention. This process is mediated by response costs and privacy fatigue. (2) Privacy fatigue plays a masking effect, i.e., increased privacy invasion experiences and response costs will raise individuals' privacy fatigue, and the feeling of privacy fatigue significantly reduces individuals' willingness to protect their privacy. (3) Promotion-focus individuals are less likely to experience privacy fatigue than those with prevention-focus. In summary, this trend of “lie flat” on social media users' privacy protection is caused by the key factor of “privacy fatigue”, and the psychological trait of regulatory focus can be used to interfere with the development of privacy fatigue. This study extends the scope of research on privacy protection and regulatory focus theory, refines the theory of protection motivation, and expands the empirical study of privacy fatigue; the findings also inform the practical governance of social network privacy.

1. Introduction

Nowadays, people communicate and share information through SNS, and it has become an integral part of the daily lives of network users worldwide (Hsu et al., 2013 ). SNS makes people's lives highly convenient. However, it also poses an increasingly serious privacy issue. For instance, British media reported that 87,000,000 Facebook users' profiles were illegally leaked to a political consulting firm, Cambridge Analytica (Revell, 2019 ). In addition, one of the three major US credit bureaus, Equifax, reported a large-scale data leak in 2017, including 146 million pieces of personal information (Zhou and Schaub, 2018 ). The incidents that happened in recent years provoked a wave of discussion on personal privacy and information security issues.

Individuals' proactive behavior in protecting online privacy information is an effective method for reducing the occurrence of privacy violations; therefore, scholars explored how to enhance individuals' willingness to protect privacy. In terms of applied theoretical models, the Health Belief Model (HBM) (Kisekka and Giboney, 2018 ), the Technology Threat Avoidance Theory (TTAT) (McLeod and Dolezel, 2022 ), the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) (Baby and Kannammal, 2020 ), and the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) (Xu et al., 2013 ) have been applied to explore the issue of online privacy protection behavior. By contrast, Protection Motivation Theory (PMT) is more applicable to studying privacy protection behavior in SNS because it focuses on threat assessment and coping mechanisms for privacy issues. However, the issue with this study's application of PMT theory is that it ignores the influence of individual emotions on protective behavior (Mousavi et al., 2020 ). Therefore, this study considered privacy fatigue as a variable to expand the theory of PMT in the context of social media privacy protection research. Moreover, in terms of the antecedents of privacy protection, existing research suggests that factors such as perceived benefits, perceived risks (Price et al., 2005 ), privacy concerns (Youn and Kim, 2019 ), self-efficacy (Baruh et al., 2017 ), and trust (Wang et al., 2017 ) can affect individuals' privacy-protective behaviors.

Along with the increased frequency of data breaches on the Internet, people find that they have less control over their data. Further, they are overwhelmed by having to protect their privacy alone. Moreover, the complexity of the measures required to protect personal information aggravates users' sense of futility, leading to exhaustion among online users. This phenomenon, defined as “privacy fatigue,” is regarded as a factor leading to the avoidance of privacy issues. Privacy fatigue has recently been prevalent among network users. However, empirical studies related to this phenomenon are still insufficient (Choi et al., 2018 ). Therefore, this study attempted to explore the role privacy burnout plays in users' privacy protection behaviors. Previous studies discovered that the impact of varying degrees of privacy invasion on privacy protection differed according to individual differences. It could be moderated by psychological differences (Lai and Hui, 2006 ). Clarifying the role of psychological traits is beneficial to the hierarchical governance of privacy protection. Regulatory focus is a kind of psychological trait based on different regulatory orientations, which could effectively affect social media users' behavioral preferences and decisions on privacy protection (Cho et al., 2019 ); however, to date, the relationship between regulatory focus, privacy fatigue, and privacy protection intentions has not been sufficiently examined. For this reason, it is necessary to empirically explore this question.

Based on the PMT theoretical framework, this study built a moderated mediation model to examine the influential mechanism of privacy-invasive experiences on privacy protection intentions by introducing three factors: response costs, privacy burnout, and regulatory focus. Data analyzed from an online survey of 4,800 network users demonstrated that, first, social media users' experiences of privacy invasion increase their willingness to protect privacy. Second, privacy burnout has a masking effect, which means that the more privacy-invasive experiences and response costs there are, the greater the privacy fatigue, which reduces users' privacy protection intentions even further. Third, promotion-focused individuals are less likely to experience fatigue from protecting personal information alone. The significance of this study lies in the fact that it bridged the gap between the effects of privacy violation experiences on individuals' protective willingness.

Meanwhile, this study verified the practicality of combining PMT theory with emotionally related variables. Additionally, it complemented the study on privacy fatigue and expanded the scope of regulatory orientation theory in privacy research. From a practical perspective, this study offered a reference for the hierarchical governance of privacy in social networks. Finally, this study reveals a vicious cycle mechanism (negative experiences, privacy fatigue, low willingness to protect, and new negative experiences) followed by a theoretical reference for breaking this cycle.

2. Theoretical framework

2.1. privacy invasion experiences, response costs, and privacy protection intentions.

Protection motivation theory (PMT) is commonly used in online privacy studies (Chen et al., 2015 ). According to Rogers ( 1975 ), individuals cognitively evaluate the risk before adopting behaviors, develop protection motivation, and eventually modify their behaviors to avoid risks. There are two sources of impact on people's response assessments: environmental and interpersonal sources of information and prior experience. After combing through the past literature, we found that many scholars have verified the influence of environmental (Wu et al., 2019 ) and interpersonal (Hsu et al., 2013 ) factors on individual privacy protection; however, only a few scholars explored the effect of privacy violation experiences on privacy protection intentions. Some studies proved that individuals' prior privacy violation experiences are an antecedent to their information privacy concerns, including in the mobile context and at the online marketplace (Pavlou and Gefen, 2005 ; Belanger and Crossler, 2019 ). Regarding privacy concerns, prior studies widely demonstrated a significant antecedent to privacy protection intentions and protective behaviors. In addition, a meta-analysis found that users who worried about privacy were less likely to use internet services and were more likely to adopt privacy-protective actions (Baruh et al., 2017 ).

People make sense of the world based on their prior experiences (Floyd et al., 2000 ), while network users who have had privacy-invasive experiences tend to believe that the privacy risks are closely related to themselves (Li, 2008 ). They tend to be more aware of the seriousness and vulnerability of privacy issues (Mohamed and Ahmad, 2012 ). The effects of previous negative experiences on perceived vulnerability can also be explained by the availability heuristic, which assumes that the easier it is to retrieve experienced cases from memory, the higher the perceived frequency of the event. In contrast, when fewer cases are retrieved, people may estimate that the event is less likely to occur than in objective situations. Therefore, people's accumulated experiences of negative events might influence their perception of future vulnerability to risk (Tversky and Kahneman, 1974 ). However, in accordance with PMT, seriousness and vulnerability affect protective behavior in the context of social media privacy issues. Therefore, we can assume that the more memories of privacy violations people have, the more likely they are to believe that their privacy will be violated by privacy exposure, thereby increasing their motivation to protect privacy that is, their willingness to protect privacy. Therefore, this study proposed the following hypothesis:

• H1: Privacy invasion experience is positively affecting protective privacy willingness.

PMT suggests that cognitive evaluation consists of assessing response costs (Rogers, 1975 ), and response costs refer to any costs, such as monetary, time, and effort (Floyd et al., 2000 ). According to findings from a health psychology study, when faced with the threat of skin cancer, people prefer to use sunscreen rather than avoid the sun (Jones and Leary, 1994 ; Wichstrom, 1994 ). It may be because of the lower response costs of utilizing sunscreen. These findings inspire us to believe that individuals calculate the response cost before they take protective actions. Privacy protection-related studies also indicate that prior experiences with personal information violations may significantly increase consumers' privacy concerns about both offline and online privacy and that privacy concerns are related to perceived risks (Okazaki et al., 2009 ; Bansal et al., 2010 ). It has also been shown that individuals who have experienced privacy invasion perceive a greater severity of risk (Petronio, 2002 ). Considering individuals' perceptions of risks affects their assessment of costs, which is part of the game between risks and benefits. In other words, a stronger risk perception indicates that higher response costs should be paid. Thus, this study assumed that people with more privacy violation experiences might perceive higher response costs and tend to take protective actions to avoid paying more. Consequently, this study made the following hypothesis:

• H2a: A higher level of privacy-invasive experiences results in a higher perception of response costs.
• H2b: A higher level of perception of response costs will result in higher privacy protection intentions.
• H2c: Response cost mediates the effect of privacy-invasive experiences on privacy protection intentions.

2.2. Privacy invasion experiences, response costs, and privacy protection intentions

The medical community first introduced the concept of fatigue and referred to it as a subjective unpleasant feeling of tiredness (Piper et al., 1987 ). The concept of fatigue has been used in many research fields, such as clinical medicine (Mao et al., 2018 ), psychology, and more (Ong et al., 2006 ). In recent years, scholars also used the concept of “fatigue” in the study of social media and regarded it as an important antecedent to individual behaviors (Ravindran et al., 2014 ). Choi et al. ( 2018 ) defined “privacy fatigue” as a psychological state of fatigue caused by privacy issues. Specifically, “privacy fatigue” manifests itself as an unwillingness to actively manage and protect one's personal information and privacy (Hargittai and Marwick, 2016 ).

With the increasing severity of social network and personal information issues, the research around privacy fatigue, especially the examination of the antecedents and effects of privacy fatigue, has been widely developed. Regarding antecedents, scholars found that privacy concerns, self-disclosure, learning about privacy statements and information security, and the complexity of privacy protection practices could influence individuals' levels of privacy fatigue (Dhir et al., 2019 ; Oh et al., 2019 ). In terms of the effects, privacy fatigue can not only cause people to reduce the frequency of using social media or even withdraw from the Internet (Ravindran et al., 2014 ), but it can also motivate individuals to resist disclosing personal information (Keith et al., 2014 ); however, only a few studies examined privacy invasion experiences, privacy fatigue, and privacy protection intentions under one theoretical framework.

Furnell and Thomson ( 2009 ) pointed out that “privacy fatigue” is triggered by an individual's experience with privacy problems. Additionally, privacy fatigue has a boundary. When this boundary is crossed, social network users become bored with privacy management, leading them to abandon social network services. It has also been suggested that privacy data breaches can cause individuals to feel “disappointed.” In a study of medical data protection, the results showed that breaches of patients' medical data can have a cumulative effect on patients' behavioral decisions by causing them to perceive that their requests for privacy protection are being ignored (Juhee and Eric, 2018 ). The relationship between privacy invasion experiences and privacy fatigue has been widely demonstrated. Such social media characteristics as internet privacy threat experience and privacy invasion could lead to users' sense of emotional exhaustion and privacy cynicism, which was further associated with social media privacy fatigue (Xiao and Mou, 2019 ; Sheng et al., 2022 ). In terms of the outcomes, some other studies focusing on the privacy paradox found that emotional exhaustion and powerlessness (the same concept as exhaustion) would weaken the positive influence relationship between privacy concerns and their willingness to protect personal information (Tian et al., 2022 ). On account of the above reviews, it is reasonable to analogize that an individual's privacy invasion experience in the context of social media use can exacerbate an individual's perception of privacy fatigue. In other words, considering the social media privacy context, privacy fatigue may lead network users to abandon privacy protection behaviors and create opportunities for privacy invasion. Based on the above discussions, we proposed the following hypotheses:

• H3a: Privacy invasion experiences positively affect privacy fatigue.
• H3b: Privacy fatigue negatively affects privacy protection intentions.
• H3c: Privacy fatigue has a masking (a form of mediating effect) role in the effects of individual social media privacy invasion experiences on privacy protection intentions.

As discussed above, we hypothesized that both response costs and privacy fatigue mediate the effect of social media users' privacy invasion experiences on their privacy protection intentions. Assuming that both response costs and privacy fatigue could mediate the effect of social media users' privacy invasion experiences on their privacy protection intentions, what is the association between response costs and privacy fatigue? It has been argued that a common shortcoming of current research applying PMT theory is that it ignores the role emotions play in this mechanism (Mousavi et al., 2020 ). This view is supported by Li's research, which argues that most research on privacy topics is conducted from a risk assessment perspective and tends to ignore the impact of emotions on privacy protection behaviors (Li et al., 2016 ). It was believed that emotions could change an individual's attention and beliefs (Friestad and Thorson, 1985 ). These factors are both related to behavioral intentions.

It has also been suggested that emotions play a mediating role in the process of behavioral decision-making (Tanner et al., 1991 ). However, only a few studies explored this influential mechanism to date. Zhang et al. ( 2022 ) found a positive influence between response costs and privacy fatigue. They conducted the research based on the Stressor-Strain-Outcome (S-S-O) framework to explore which factors (stressors) could cause privacy fatigue intentions (strain) and related behaviors (outcome). The results discovered that time cost and several other stressors significantly positively impact social media fatigue intention. As quoted from Floyd et al. ( 2000 ), “response costs” refer to any costs in which time costs were included. Despite an important reference to the above study's results provided for this study, the time cost is just one factor among response costs. This piece of research will focus on general response costs, assisting in a better understanding of this influential mechanism. Based on this, we proposed the following hypotheses:

• H4a: Privacy response costs are positively associated with privacy fatigue.
• H4b: Response costs and privacy fatigue play chain mediating roles in the effect of privacy invasion experiences on privacy protection intentions.

2.3. Regulatory focus as the moderator

Differences in individual psychological traits can lead to significant differences in individuals' cognition and behaviors (Benbasat and Dexter, 1982 ), and it has been shown that personal psychological traits can influence individuals' perceptions of fatigue (Dhir et al., 2019 ). A recent study also found that neuroticism has positive effects on privacy fatigue but that traits like agreeableness and extraversion have negative effects (Tang et al., 2021 ). However, previous research on social media privacy fatigue is relatively limited. Given the critical nature of privacy fatigue in research models, it is necessary to explore the differences in perceived fatigue among individuals with different psychological traits. This study introduced individual levels of regulatory focus as a moderator and examined the effect of privacy invasion experiences on privacy fatigue. Regulatory focus as a psychological trait was applied to explain social media users' privacy management and privacy protection problems (Wirtz and Lwin, 2009 ; Li et al., 2019 ).

Regulatory Focus Theory (RFT) classifies individuals into two different levels based on psychological traits: promotion focus, which focuses more on benefits and ignores potential risks, and prevention focus, which tends to avoid risks and ignore benefits when making decisions (Higgins, 1997 ). Research demonstrated that perceptions of benefits are supposed to reduce fatigue, while perceptions of risk could exacerbate fatigue (Boksem and Tops, 2008 ). By the same analogy, promotion-focused individuals are more inclined to notice the benefits of using social media (Jin, 2012 ) and thus may experience less fatigue and lower response costs when experiencing privacy violations; in contrast, individuals with a prevention focus are more aware of the risks associated with privacy invasion and thus have more concerns about privacy issues, which can lead to more feelings of fatigue and higher perceived response costs about privacy issues. Combined with H4, we can reason that the path of influence of social media privacy invasion experiences on privacy protection intentions may be affected by the level of individual regulatory focus. The effect of privacy invasion experiences on privacy fatigue and response costs was stronger for individuals who tended to be prevention focused than for those who tended to be promotion focused. Therefore, the mediating effect of privacy fatigue and response cost is stronger. In summary, this study proposed the hypotheses as follows:

• H5a: Compared to promotion-focused users, the effect of privacy invasion experiences on privacy fatigue is greater for prevention-focused users.
• H5b: Compared to prevention-focused users, the effect of privacy invasion experiences on response costs is greater for promotion-focused users.

2.4. Current study

In summary, the current study concluded that, in the social media context, users' experiences of privacy invasion would increase their perception of response costs and thus result in privacy fatigue. Privacy fatigue decreases individuals' privacy protection intentions. However, this process differed for individuals with different regulatory focuses. In detail, individuals with a promotion focus are less likely to experience privacy fatigue than individuals with a prevention focus. Based on the above logic, the conceptual model constructed in this study is shown in Figure 1 .

Conceptual model.

3. Materials and methods

3.1. participants and procedures.

This survey was conducted in December 2021, and Zhejiang Lab collected the data. The questionnaire was pretested with a small group of participants to ensure the questions were clearly phrased. Participants were informed of their right to withdraw and were assured of confidentiality and anonymity before participating in this research survey. Computers, tablets, and mobile phones were all used to complete the cross-sectional survey. After giving their consent, participants were asked to complete the following scales. After the screening, 4,800 valid questionnaires were selected. The invalid questionnaires were deleted mainly based on not passing the test of the screening questions rather than not answering the questions carefully (e.g., the answers to the questions of several consecutive variables are the same, or the number of repeated options is >70%).

To guarantee data quality and reduce possible interference from gender and geographical factors, this survey used a quota sampling method, as shown in Table 1 , with a sample gender ratio of 1:1 and samples from 16 cities in China, with 300 valid samples in each city. Considering the possible relationship between the privacy invasion experience and the years of Internet usage, participants' previous privacy invasion experience is meaningful to this study, and the final sample had 34.5 and 57.3% of Internet usage between 5 and 10 years and more than 10 years, respectively, which met the requirements of the study. In terms of education level, college and bachelor's degrees accounted for the largest proportion, at 62.0%, followed by high school/junior high school and vocational high school, at 27.3%. In terms of the age of the sample, the ratio of those younger than 46 years old to those above was 59.7:40.3 with a balanced distribution among all age groups. The basic demographic variables are tabulated as shown in Table 1 .

Statistical table of basic information on effective samples.

3.2. Measurements

Based on the model and hypotheses of this study, the instruments of this study included measures of privacy invasion experiences, response costs, privacy fatigue, privacy protection intentions, and regulatory focus (including promotion focus and prevention focus). This study's questionnaire was designed on scales that have been pre-validated. All scales were adapted based on social media contexts, and all responses were graded on a Likert scale ranging from 0 (strongly disagree) to 6 (strongly agree). A higher score was a better fit for that measure. Sub-items within each scale were averaged, resulting in composite scores.

The privacy invasion experiences scale was referenced from Su's study (Su et al., 2018 ). The scale is a 3-item self-reported scale (e.g., “My personal information, such as my phone number, shopping history, and more, is used to be shared by intelligent media with third-party platforms.”). The response cost scale was developed from the scale in the study by Yoon et al. ( 2012 ), which included three measurement questions (e.g., “When personal information security is at risk on social media, I consider that taking practical action will take too much time and effort.”). The privacy fatigue scale was derived from a related study by Choi et al. ( 2018 ), and the current study applied this 4-item scale to measure privacy fatigue on social media (e.g., “Dealing with personal information protection issues on social media makes me tired.”). The privacy protection intention scale was based on the scale developed by Liang and Xue ( 2010 ), which contains three measurement items (e.g., “When my personal information security is threatened on social media, I am willing to make efforts to protect it.”). The regulatory focus scale was derived from the original scale developed by Higgins ( 2002 ) and later adapted by Chinese scholars for use with Chinese samples (Cui et al., 2014 ). The scale contains six items on measures for promotion focus (e.g., “For what I want to do, I can do it all well”) and four items on measures for prevention focus (e.g., “While growing up, I often did things that my parents didn't agree were right”). The regulatory focus was measured by subtracting the average prevention score from the average promotion score, with higher differences indicating a greater tendency toward promotion focus and lower differences indicating a greater tendency toward prevention focus (Cui et al., 2014 ).

3.3. Data analysis

The validity and reliability of our questionnaire were tested using Mplus8. The PROCESS macro for SPSS was used to evaluate the moderated chain mediation model with the bootstrapping method (95 percent CI, 5,000 samples). Gender (1 = men, 0 = women), age, the highest degree obtained, and Internet lifetime are among the covariates examined in this model.

4.1. Measurement of the model

As shown in Table 2 , privacy invasion experiences, response costs, privacy fatigue, and privacy protection intentions are all factors to consider. Cronbach's α and composite reliability of scales are higher than the acceptable value (>0.70). Although the Cronbach's α for promotion and prevention focus were slightly <0.70, they were >0.60 and close to 0.70, which was also considered permissible due to the large sample size of this study, and the reliability test of the measurement model in this study was qualified (Hair et al., 2019 ).

Results of the validity and reliability.

PIE, privacy invasion experiences; PC, response costs; PF, privacy fatigue; PPI, privacy protection intentions. Bold value is the square root of AVE.

Since the measurement instruments in this study were derived from validated scales, the average variance extracted (AVE) was higher than 0.5, but we can accept 0.4. According to Fornell and Larcker ( 1981 ), if the AVE is <0.5, but the composite reliability is higher than 0.6, the construct's convergent validity is still acceptable (Fornell and Larcker, 1981 ). Further, Lam ( 2012 ) also explained and confirmed this view (Lam, 2012 ). Discriminant validity was tested by comparing the square root of AVE with the correlations of the researched variables. The square root of the AVE was higher than the correlation, indicating good discriminant validity.

Then, we tested the goodness of fit indices. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) of our questionnaire produced acceptable fit values for the one-dimensional factor structure (RMSEA = 0.048 0.15, SRMR = 0.042 0.05, GFI = 0.955 > 0.9, CFI = 0.947 > 0.9, NFI = 0.943 > 0.9, and 948 = 0.945 > 0.9) after introducing the error covariances in the model. In summary, the current study passed the reliability and validity tests.

4.2. Descriptive statistics

Table 3 shows the descriptive statistics and correlation analysis results. Response costs, privacy fatigue, and privacy protection intentions were all positively correlated with privacy invasion experiences. Privacy fatigue and privacy protection intentions were both positively correlated with response costs. Private fatigue was found to be negatively related to privacy protection intentions.

Means, standard deviations, and correlations among research variables.

PIE, privacy invasion experiences; PC, response costs; PF, privacy fatigue; PPI, privacy protection intentions; RF, regulatory focus; ** p < 0.01.

4.3. Relationship between privacy invasion experience and privacy protection intentions

Table 4 shows the results of the polynomial regression analysis. Privacy invasion experiences significantly influenced levels of response costs (β = 0.466, SE = 0.023, t = 11.936, p = 0.000), privacy fatigue (β = 0.297, SE = 0.022, t = 13.722, p = 0.000), and privacy protection intentions (β = 0.133, SE = 0.011, t = 12.382, p = 0.000) after controlling for gender, highest degree obtained, age, and Internet lifetime. Response costs positively predicted privacy fatigue (β = 0.382, SE = 0.013, t = 29.793, p = 0.000) and privacy protection intention (β = 0.098, SE = 0.010, t = 9.495, p = 0.000). However, privacy fatigue was significantly negatively correlated with privacy protection intentions (β = −0.130, SE = 0.011, t = −12.303, p = 0.000) in this model. In conclusion, H1, H2a, H2b, H3a, H3b, and H4a were supported.

Multiple regression results of the moderated mediation model.

PIE, privacy invasion experiences; PC, response costs; PF, privacy fatigue; PPI, privacy protection intentions; RF, regulatory focus; * p < 0.05; ** p < 0.01; *** p < 0.001; β, unstandardized regression weight; SE, standard error for the unstandardized regression weight; t, t-test statistic; F, F-test statistic.

Then, we used Model 6 of PROCESS to test the mediating effect in our model. As the results in Table 5 , H2c, H3c, and H4b were accepted.

Results of mediating effect test.

PIE, privacy invasion experiences; PC, response costs; PF, privacy fatigue; PPI, privacy protection intentions.

Model 84 in the SPSS PROCESS macro is applied to carry out the bootstrapping test to examine the moderation effect of regulatory focus. Privacy invasion experiences, response costs, privacy fatigue, and regulatory focus were centralized before constructing the interaction term. The results showed that regulatory focus significantly moderated the effect of privacy invasion experiences on privacy fatigue [95% Boot CI = (0.002, 0.006), and H5a was supported. In addition, the mediating effect was significant at a low level of regulatory focus (−1 SD; Effec t = −0.038; 95% Boot CI = (−0.046, −0.030)], medium level of regulatory focus [Effec t = −0.032; 95% Boot CI = (−0.039, −0.026)] and high level of regulatory focus [+1 SD; Effec t = −0.026; 95% Boot CI = (−0.032, 0.020)]. Specifically, the mediating effect of privacy fatigue decreased as individuals increasingly tended to be promotion focused. However, the regulatory focus did not significantly moderate the effect of privacy invasion experiences on response costs [95% Boot CI = (−0.001, 0.003)], and H5b was rejected.

Meanwhile, privacy invasion experiences × regulatory focus interaction significantly predicted privacy fatigue (β = −0.046, SE = 0.008, t = −3.694, p = 0.000; see Figure 2 ). The influence of privacy invasion experiences on privacy fatigue was significant when the level of regulatory focus was high (β = 0.385, SE = 0.016, t = 23.981, p = 0.000), medium (β = 0.430, SE = 0.015, t = 29.415, p = 0.000), and low (β = 0.475, SE = 0.022, t = 22.061, p = 0.000). Specifically, the more the individuals tended to be promotion focused (high regulatory focus scores), the less the level of fatigue caused by privacy invasion, and the more the individuals tended to be prevention focused (low regulatory focus scores), the more the level of fatigue was caused by privacy invasion.

Simple slope test of the interaction between PIE and RF on the PF.

5. Discussion

The purpose of the present study was to explore the relationship among privacy invasion experiences, response costs, privacy fatigue, privacy protection intentions, and regulatory focus. This study showed that response costs and privacy fatigue play mediating roles, whereas regulatory focus plays a moderating role in this process (as shown in Figure 3 ). These findings help clarify how and under which circumstances social media users' privacy invasion experiences affect their privacy protection intentions, thereby providing a means to improve people's privacy situation on social media platforms.

The moderated chain mediation model. Dashed lines represent nonsignificant relations *** p < 0.001.

5.1. A chain mediation of response costs and privacy fatigue

The current study found that social media users' privacy invasion experiences have a significant positive effect on their response costs, and the increase in response costs will in turn increase individuals' privacy protection intentions. This finding was consistent with previous literature on health psychology, which found that individuals calculate response costs for different actions before making decisions. The higher the response costs individuals perceive, the greater the possibility that they will improve their protective intention (Jones and Leary, 1994 ; Wichstrom, 1994 ). Compared with users who experienced less privacy invasion on social media, people who experienced more privacy violations would perceive a higher level of response costs, which would further increase their protective intention to avoid dealing with the negative outcomes followed by privacy invasion.

The study also found that social media users' privacy invasion experiences had a significant positive effect on privacy fatigue, which is consistent with prior research on social media use (Xiao and Mou, 2019 ; Sheng et al., 2022 ). At the same time, response costs also positively affected privacy fatigue, and research on social media fatigue behaviors indicated this influential mechanism in the past (Zhang et al., 2022 ). However, this study additionally found that response costs partially mediated the effect of privacy invasion experiences on privacy fatigue. Although both increased privacy invasion experiences and increased response costs will improve social media users' privacy protection intentions, privacy fatigue can mask this process, i.e., increased privacy fatigue reduces individuals' privacy protection intentions.

Moreover, this study revealed that response costs and privacy fatigue play chain-mediated roles in the effect of social media privacy invasion experiences on privacy protection intentions and further explained the mechanism. In addition, the masking effect of privacy fatigue also explains why privacy invasion experiences do not have a strong effect on privacy protection intentions. In other words, this privacy fatigue is an important reason that people currently “lie flat” (adopt passive protection) in the face of privacy-invasive issues online.

5.2. Regulatory focus as moderator

The relationship between social media privacy invasion experiences and privacy fatigue was moderated by regulatory focus. To be more specific, the more the people who promoted their privacy, the less the level of privacy fatigue they felt; the more the people who prevented their privacy, the more the level of privacy fatigue they felt. In other words, promotion focus acts as a buffer in this process. In other words, promotion focus has a buffering effect in this process. To some extent, the result of this study verified that different regulated individuals would sense different levels of fatigue due to their pursuing benefits or avoiding risks when they make decisions (Boksem and Tops, 2008 ; Jin, 2012 ). On the other hand, the regulatory focus did not moderate the relationship between privacy invasion experiences and response costs. One possible explanation is that, compared with privacy fatigue, response costs to privacy violations are based on exact experiences in users' memories. Individuals who have had more privacy invasions have more experience dealing with the negative consequences of privacy violations. Thus, whether psychological traits were added or not, the effect of privacy-invasive experiences on response costs would not be strengthened or weakened.

Meanwhile, this study has proven a moderated mediation model investigating the moderating role of regulatory focus in mediating “privacy invasion experiences—privacy fatigue—privacy protection intentions.” The results indicated that, as individuals tend to be prevention focused, privacy invasion experiences affect individuals' privacy protection intentions through the mediating role of privacy fatigue; specifically, the more they tend to be prevention focused, the stronger their privacy fatigue and the weaker their privacy protection intentions. Therefore, interventions for privacy fatigue (e.g., improving media literacy, creating a better online environment, and more) can be used to enhance social media users' privacy protection intentions (Bucher et al., 2013 ; Agozie and Kaya, 2021 ). In particular, focusing on social media users who tend to be prevention focused is crucial.

5.3. Implication

From a theoretical perspective, our study found a mechanism for influencing privacy-protective behavior based on an extension of the protective motivation theory. Protection motivation theory is a fear-based theory. We used our experiences with social media privacy invasions as a source of fear. Based on this, we found that these experiences were associated with individuals' privacy protection intentions. We explained the mechanism through the mediating variable of response costs, which is also consistent with previous findings (Chen et al., 2016 ).

More importantly, however, in response to what previous researchers have argued is an emotional factor that traditional protection motivation theory ignores (Mousavi et al., 2020 ), our study extended traditional protection motivation theory to include privacy fatigue as a factor and verified that fatigue significantly reduces social media users' privacy protection intentions. The introduction of “privacy fatigue” can better explain why occasional privacy invasion experiences do not cause privacy-protective behaviors, which is another possible explanation for the privacy paradox in addition to the traditional privacy calculus theory. The introduction of “privacy fatigue” has also inspired researchers to pay attention to individual emotions in privacy research. This study also compared differences in privacy protection intentions among social media users of different regulatory focus types, which are mainly caused by fatigue rather than response costs. By combining privacy fatigue and regulatory focus, it was found that not all subjects felt the same level of privacy fatigue after experiencing privacy invasion. This study also expanded the application of both privacy fatigue and regulatory focus theories and built a bridge between online privacy research and regulatory focus theory.

In addition to the aforementioned implications for research and theory, the findings also have some useful, practical implications. First of all, the findings of this piece ask for measures to reduce privacy invasion on social media. (a) Reducing the incidence of privacy violations at their root requires improving the current online privacy environment on social media platforms. We call on the government to strengthen the regulation of online privacy and social media platforms to reinforce the protection of users' privacy. To a large extent, users' personal information should not be misused. (b) From the social media agent perspective, relevant studies mentioned that content relevance perceived by online users could mitigate the negative relations between privacy invasion and continuous use intention (Zhu and Chang, 2016 ). Social media agents should improve their efficiency in using qualified personal information, giving users a smoother experience on online platforms.

Second, the results show that privacy fatigue could affect users' privacy protection intentions. (c) According to Choi et al. ( 2018 ), users have a tolerance threshold for privacy fatigue. The policy should formulate an acceptable level of privacy protection. Other scholars suggested that online service providers should avoid excessively or unnecessarily collecting personal information and forbid sharing or selling users' personal information strictly with any third party without their permission (Tang et al., 2021 ). (d) Another effective way is to reduce response costs to reduce the costs of protecting one's privacy. For example, social media platforms can optimize privacy interfaces and management tools or provide more effective feedback mechanisms for users. (e) In addition, improving users' privacy literacy (especially for prevention-focused individuals) can also be effective in reducing privacy fatigue (Bucher et al., 2013 ).

Finally, different measures should be applied based on different regulatory-focused users. (f) Social media managers could further classify users into groups based on their psychological characteristics and manage them in accordance with their requirements for the level of privacy protection. Thereby, social media users may have a wider range of choices. Specifically, due to previous privacy invasive experience, prevention-focused individuals tend to feel more privacy fatigue, requiring additional privacy protection features for prevention-focused users. For example, social media platforms could offer specific explanations of privacy protection technologies to increase prevention-focused individuals' trust in privacy protection technologies.

5.4. Limitations and future directions

There are still some limitations present in this article. Firstly, this study solely selected response costs as individuals' cognitive process, whereas threat appraisal was also included in the cognitive process of protection motivation theory, which focused on the potential outcomes of risky behaviors, including perceived vulnerability, perceived severity of the risk, and rewards associated with risky behavior (Prentice-Dunn et al., 2009 ). Future studies could systematically consider the association between these factors and privacy protection intentions. Second, users' perceptions of privacy invasion are different across various social media platforms (e.g., Instagram and Facebook), and this study only applies to a generalized social media context. Future research could pay more attention to the differences among users on different social media platforms (with different functions). Finally, this study did not focus on specific privacy invasion experiences. However, studies pointed out that different types of privacy invasions affect people differently. Moreover, people with different demographical backgrounds, such as cultural backgrounds and gender, would react differently when faced with the same situation (Klein and Helweg-Larsen, 2002 ). Future research can investigate this in more depth through experiments.

6. Conclusion

In conclusion, our findings suggest that social media privacy invasion experiences increase individuals' privacy protection intentions by increasing their response costs, but e increase in privacy fatigue masks this effect. Pivacy fatigue is a barrier to increasing social media users' willingness to protect their privacy, which explains why users do not seem to show a stronger willingness to protect their privacy when privacy invasion is a growing problem in social networks nowadays. Our study also revealed a different level of fatigue that individuals with different levels of regulatory focus exhibit when faced with the same level of privacy invasion experience. In particular, prevention-focused social media users are more likely to become fatigued. Therefore, social media agents should pay special attention to these individuals because they may be particularly vulnerable to privacy violations. Furthermore, the current research on privacy fatigue has yet to be expanded, and future researchers can add to it.

Our theoretical analysis and empirical results further emphasize the distinction between individuals, a differentiation that allows researchers to align their analyses with theoretical hypotheses more tightly. This applies not only to research on the effects of privacy invasion experiences on privacy behavior but also to exploring other privacy topics. Therefore, we recommend that future privacy research be more human-oriented, which will also benefit the current “hierarchical governance” of the Internet privacy issue.

Data availability statement

Ethics statement.

This study was approved by the Academic Committee of the School of Journalism and Communication at Xiamen University, and we carefully verified that we complied strictly with the ethical guidelines.

Author contributions

CG is responsible for the overall research design, thesis writing, collation of the questionnaire, and data analysis. SC and ML are responsible for the guidance. JW is responsible for the proofreading and article touch-up. All authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version.

Acknowledgments

The authors thank all the participants of this study. The participants were all informed about the purpose and content of the study and voluntarily agreed to participate. The participants were able to stop participating at any time without penalty.

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Publisher's note

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

Supplementary material

The Supplementary Material for this article can be found online at: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.1031592/full#supplementary-material

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Privacy perception and protection on Chinese social media: a case study of WeChat

• Original Paper
• Published: 05 September 2018
• Volume 20 , pages 279–289, ( 2018 )

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• Zhen Troy Chen 1 &
• Ming Cheung   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-6711-9290 2  

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In this study, the under-examined area of privacy perception and protection on Chinese social media is investigated. The prevalence of digital technology shapes the social, political and cultural aspects of the lives of urban young adults. The influential Chinese social media platform WeChat is taken as a case study, and the ease of connection, communication and transaction combined with issues of commercialisation and surveillance are discussed in the framework of the privacy paradox. Protective behaviour and tactics are examined through different perceptions of privacy in the digital age. The findings of this study suggest that users possess certain amount of freedoms on WeChat. However, users’ individual privacy attitudes and behaviour in practice suggest they have a declined sense of their own freedom and right to privacy. A privacy paradox exists when users, while holding a high level of concerns, in reality do little to further the protection of their personal information on WeChat. We argue that once a user has ingrained part of their social engagement within the WeChat system, the incentive for them to remain a part of the system outweighs their requirement to secure their privacy online as their decision-making is largely based on a simple cost-benefit analysis. The power and social capital yielded via WeChat is too valuable to give up as WeChat is widely used not only for private conversations, but also for study or work-related purposes. It further blurs the boundaries between the public, the professional and the private, which is a rather unique case compared with other social media around the world.

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Chen, Z.T., Cheung, M. Privacy perception and protection on Chinese social media: a case study of WeChat. Ethics Inf Technol 20 , 279–289 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-018-9480-6

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How to write a social media case study (with template)

Written by by Jenn Chen

Published on  October 10, 2019

Reading time  8 minutes

You’ve got a good number of social media clients under your belt and you feel fairly confident in your own service or product content marketing strategy. To attract new clients, you’ll tell them how you’ve tripled someone else’s engagement rates but how do they know this is true? Enter the case study.

Social media case studies are often used as part of a sales funnel: the potential client sees themselves in the case study and signs up because they want the same or better results. At Sprout, we use this strategy with our own case studies highlighting our customer’s successes.

Writing and publishing case studies is time intensive but straight forward. This guide will walk through how to create a social media case study for your business and highlight some examples.

What is a social media case study?

A case study is basically a long testimonial or review. Case studies commonly highlight what a business has achieved by using a social media service or strategy, and they illustrate how your company’s offerings help clients in a specific situation. Some case studies are written just to examine how a problem was solved or performance was improved from a general perspective. For this guide, we’ll be examining case studies that are focused on highlighting a company’s own products and services.

Case studies come in all content formats: long-form article, downloadable PDF, video and infographic. A single case study can be recycled into different formats as long as the information is still relevant.

At their core, case studies serve to inform a current or potential customer about a real-life scenario where your service or product was applied. There’s often a set date range for the campaign and accompanying, real-life statistics. The idea is to help the reader get a clearer understanding of how to use your product and why it could help.

Broad selling points like “our service will cut down your response time” are nice but a sentence like “After three months of using the software for responses, the company decreased their response time by 52%” works even better. It’s no longer a dream that you’ll help them decrease the response time because you already have with another company.

So now that you understand what a case study is, let’s get started on how to create one that’s effective and will help attract new clients.

How to write a social marketing case study

Writing an effective case study is all about the prep work. You’ve got to get all of the questions and set up ready so you can minimize lots of back and forth between you and the client.

1. Prepare your questions

Depending on how the case study will be presented and how familiar you are with the client to be featured, you may want to send some preliminary questions before the interview. It’s important to not only get permission from the company to use their logo, quotes and graphs but also to make sure they know they’ll be going into a public case study.

Your preliminary questions should cover background information about the company and ask about campaigns they are interested in discussing. Be sure to also identify which of your products and services they used. You can go into the details in the interview.

Once you receive the preliminary answers back, it’s time to prepare your questions for the interview. This is where you’ll get more information about how they used your products and how they contributed to the campaign’s success.

2. Interview

When you conduct your interview, think ahead on how you want it to be done. Whether it’s a phone call, video meeting or in-person meeting, you want to make sure it’s recorded. You can use tools like Google Meet, Zoom or UberConference to host and record calls (with your client’s permission, of course). This ensures that your quotes are accurate and you can play it back in case you miss any information. Tip: test out your recording device and process before the interview. You don’t want to go through the interview only to find out the recording didn’t save.

Ask open-ended questions to invite good quotes. You may need to use follow-up questions if the answers are too vague. Here are some examples.

• Explain how you use (your product or service) in general and for the campaign. Please name specific features.
• Describe how the feature helped your campaign achieve success.
• What were the campaign outcomes?
• What did you learn from the campaign?

Since we’re focused on creating a social media case study in this case, you can dive more deeply into social strategies and tactics too:

• Tell me about your approach to social media. How has it changed over time, if at all? What role does it play for the organization? How do you use it? What are you hoping to achieve?
• Are there specific social channels you prioritize? If so, why?
• How do you make sure your social efforts are reaching the right audience?
• What specific challenges do organizations like yours face when it comes to social?
• How do you measure the ROI of using social ? Are there certain outcomes that prove the value of social for your organization? What metrics are you using to determine how effective social is for you?

As the conversation continues, you can ask more leading questions if you need to to make sure you get quotes that tie these strategic insights directly back to the services, products or strategies your company has delivered to the client to help them achieve success. Here are just a couple of examples.

• Are there specific features that stick out to you as particularly helpful or especially beneficial for you and your objectives?
• How are you using (product/service) to support your social strategy? What’s a typical day like for your team using it?

The above quote was inserted into the Sprout Lake Metroparks case study . It’s an example of identifying a quote from an interview that helps make the impact of the product tangible in a client’s day to day.

At the end of the interview, be sure to thank the company and request relevant assets.

Afterwards, you may want to transcribe the interview to increase the ease of reviewing the material and writing the case study. You can DIY or use a paid service like Rev to speed up this part of the process.

3. Request assets and graphics

This is another important prep step because you want to make sure you get everything you need out of one request and avoid back and forth that takes up both you and your customer’s time. Be very clear on what you need and the file formats you need them in.

Some common assets include:

• Logo in .png format
• Logo guidelines so you know how to use them correctly
• Links to social media posts that were used during the campaign
• Headshots of people you interviewed
• Social media analytics reports. Make sure you name them and provide the requested date range, so that if you’re using a tool like Sprout, clients know which one to export.

4. Write the copy

Now that the information has been collected, it’s time to dissect it all and assemble it. At the end of this guide, we have an example outline template for you to follow. When writing a case study, you want to write to the audience that you’re trying to attract . In this case, it’ll be a potential customer that’s similar to the one you’re highlighting.

Use a mix of sentences and bullet points to attract different kinds of readers. The tone should be uplifting because you’re highlighting a success story. When identifying quotes to use, remove any fillers (“um”) and cut out unnecessary info.

5. Pay attention to formatting

And finally, depending on the content type, enlist the help of a graphic designer to make it look presentable. You may also want to include call-to-action buttons or links inside of your article. If you offer free trials, case studies are a great place to promote them.

Social media case study template

Writing a case study is a lot like writing a story or presenting a research paper (but less dry). This is a general outline to follow but you are welcome to enhance to fit your needs.

Headline Attention-grabbing and effective. Example: “ How Benefit turns cosmetics into connection using Sprout Social ” Summary A few sentences long with a basic overview of the brand’s story. Give the who, what, where, why and how. Which service and/or product did they use? Introduce the company Give background on who you’re highlighting. Include pertinent information like how big their social media team is, information about who you interviewed and how they run their social media. Describe the problem or campaign What were they trying to solve? Why was this a problem for them? What were the goals of the campaign? Present the solution and end results Describe what was done to achieve success. Include relevant social media statistics (graphics are encouraged). Conclusion Wrap it up with a reflection from the company spokesperson. How did they think the campaign went? What would they change to build on this success for the future? How did using the service compare to other services used in a similar situation?

Case studies are essential marketing and sales tools for any business that offer robust services or products. They help the customer reading them to picture their own company using the product in a similar fashion. Like a testimonial, words from the case study’s company carry more weight than sales points from the company.

When creating your first case study, keep in mind that preparation is the key to success. You want to find a company that is more than happy to sing your praises and share details about their social media campaign.

Once you’ve started developing case studies, find out the best ways to promote them alongside all your other content with our free social media content mix tool .

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A TikTok ban in the United States took a step closer to becoming a reality

Michel Martin

Bobby Allyn

The House overwhelmingly approved a bill Saturday that could lead to the company being banned in the U.S., and it's on a fast track to President Biden's desk.

MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:

TikTok is facing what might be its biggest threat yet here in the U.S.

A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:

Yeah. That's because the House overwhelmingly approved a bill Saturday that could lead to the social media company's ban in the United States. And because it's part of the foreign aid package to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, which also passed over the weekend, it's on the fast track to President Biden's desk.

MARTIN: NPR tech correspondent Bobby Allyn is covering this story, and he's with us now to tell us more about it. Good morning, Bobby.

BOBBY ALLYN, BYLINE: Good morning, Michel.

MARTIN: So how did this bill come about in the first place?

ALLYN: Well, TikTok was really caught off guard. It was attached to a large package of aid for Israel and Ukraine. The House tried to pass this once before, and it didn't advance in the Senate. But this time, it is all but guaranteed to become law. The way it came about, though, kind of tucked into this foreign aid package, really sparked some criticism on social media. Let's just say, Michel, some people just thought it was very sneaky.

MARTIN: Now, we've heard a number of lawmakers express real alarm about TikTok, I mean, some calling it a spy balloon in Americans' phones. So just - if you could just set the rhetoric aside for a minute, what are the fears about?

ALLYN: Yeah. Well, the concern is that China, at any time, can ask ByteDance, TikTok's owner, for access to Americans' data and could spy on U.S. citizens. Or China could put their finger on the scale and influence what Americans see on their TikTok feeds, especially worrying ahead of a presidential election. Here's how Florida Republican Kat Cammack framed this bill when it first passed in the House last month.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

KAT CAMMACK: We aren't infringing on constitutionally protected speech or growing the size of government. All we're saying is break up with the Chinese Communist Party.

ALLYN: Yeah. And that's something that's become a refrain in Washington. It's worth pointing out, though, that the Chinese Communist Party does not control TikTok or its parent company. But under the country's intelligence laws, TikTok would be legally bound to supply information on you or me or anyone else on TikTok whenever the government asked. For another perspective, here's North Carolina Republican Dan Bishop from last month's debate.

DAN BISHOP: America confronts a great challenge in China, and it will not prevail by becoming more like it.

ALLYN: You know, how can the U.S. condemn authoritarian regimes for shutting down social media sites when here we are trying to do the very same thing? Overall, though, Michel, there really is bipartisan support for cracking down on TikTok.

MARTIN: So next up is the Senate. A vote could come tomorrow, and President Biden has signaled he plans to sign it. What happens then?

ALLYN: Well, once Biden signs it, ByteDance will have a year to sell the company. If it's not sold by then, it will become illegal in the U.S. for TikTok to be carried by any web hosting services. Apple and Google will have to remove it from their app stores, which, in effect, would be a nationwide ban. Now, TikTok is gearing up to take this to court. The company sees this as the suppression of free speech. Bottom line, though, Michel, TikTok will not be disappearing from our phones anytime soon.

MARTIN: And Bobby, before we let you go, how likely is it that TikTok finds a buyer?

ALLYN: That is the big question, but there's two things to consider here - the price and TikTok's algorithm. It's one of the most popular apps in the world, so it's going to be really expensive to buy, maybe more than $100 billion. That limits potential buyers. And the algorithm - China must approve the selling of this algorithm, and China said it will not be doing that. So there's a real question here. What are you even buying if you are trying to buy TikTok, right? To buy a social media app without the algorithm is like trying to buy Coca-Cola without its secret recipe. Who would want to do that?

MARTIN: I don't know. Who would? That is NPR's Bobby Allyn. Bobby, thank you.

ALLYN: Hey, thanks so much.

(SOUNDBITE OF SARAH, THE ILLSTRUMENTALIST'S "WHERE THE SUN LIVES")

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20 Best Social Media Marketing Case Study Examples

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How would you like to read the best social media marketing case studies ever published?

More importantly, how would you like to copy the best practices in social media marketing that are based on real-world examples and not just theory?

Below, you’ll find a list of the top 20 social media case study examples along with the results and key findings. By studying these social media marketing studies and applying the lessons learned on your own accounts, you can hopefully achieve similar results.

Table of Contents

Social Media Case Study Examples

793,500+ impressions for semrush on twitter  – walker sands social media case study.

The case study shows how Walker Sands implemented a premium Twitter microcontent program for Semrush, a global leader in digital marketing software. Semrush needed a strategic social media marketing partner to help distinguish its brand from competitors, drive a higher engagement rate among its target audience, and build brand loyalty. In this case study, you’ll find out how the social strategy focused on three things: using humor, embedding the brand in trending conversations, and focusing on the audience’s interests over marketing messages. The result was an increase of more than 793,500 impressions, 34,800 engagements, and a 4.4% average engagement rate.

Viral Oreo Super Bowl Tweet  – Social Media Case Study

This is a popular case study to learn valuable insights for B2C marketing. During Super Bowl XLVII, the lights went out in the football stadium and the Oreo brand went viral with a single tweet that said “Power out? No problem. You can still dunk in the dark.” Read the historical account of that famous social media marketing moment from the people who lived through it so you can gather ideas on how to be better prepared for future social media campaigns that you can take advantage of in real-time.

Facebook Posting Strategy That Lead to 3X Reach & Engagement  – Buffer Social Media Case Study

In this social media case study example, you’ll find out how Buffer cut its Facebook posting frequency by 50% but increased the average weekly reach and engagement by 3X. Hint: The strategy had to do with creating fewer, better-quality posts, that were aimed at gaining higher engagement.

Achieving a 9 Million Audience by Automating Pinterest SEO  – Social Media Case Study

This is a good social media marketing case study for marketers who use Pinterest. Discover how Chillital went from 0 to 9 million engaged audience members and 268 million impressions. You’ll learn about the step-by-step research process of finding where your audience lives and breathes content, get a detailed analysis of how the author used Pinterest to generate brand awareness, and learn about using community-driven content promotion to scale social media results.

5X Increase In App Installs from TikTok  – Bumble Social Media Case Study

With the use of TikTok on the rise, social media case studies are now being shared about how to get the most value out of marketing on this platform. This one, in particular, is good to read because it explains how Bumble, a dating app, used TikTok more effectively by following the mantra, “Don’t Make Ads, Make TikToks”. This case study in social media marketing resulted in a 5X increase in app installs and a 64% decrease in cost-per-registration.

330% Increase In Reach for the Make a Wish Foundation – Disney Social Media Case Study

Check out this case study to find out how the Make-A-Wish Foundation increased its social media reach, audience, and engagement by partnering with Disney in a Share Your Ears campaign. The strategy was simple: ask people to take a photo of themselves wearing Mickey Mouse ears, post it on social media with the hashtag #ShareYouEars, and a $5 donation would be made to Make-A-Wish. The results were unbelievable with over 1.7 million posted photos and 420 million social media impressions. This led to a 15% audience increase on Facebook and a 13% audience increase on Instagram with a total increase of 330% in social media reach and a 554% increase in engagement during the campaign.

How 3 Schools Used Social Media Advertising to Increase Website Traffic & Applications – Social Media Case Study

This example includes three of the best social media case studies from Finalsite, a marketing agency for educational institutions. It shows the power of social media advertising to increase website traffic and enrollment. One case study, in particular, shows how a limited budget of $350 per month increased website sessions by 515%, more than 2,200 clicks on the apply button for a study abroad application, 2,419 views on the request information page, and 575 views on the application process page.

Client Case Studies – LYFE Marketing Social Media Case Study

LYFE Marketing is a social media management company that helps clients gain new customers, generate sales, and increase brand exposure online. This page includes several of its top social media marketing case studies along with the approach and key results from each campaign. It’s packed with screenshots of the social media posts and engagement metrics so you can understand how each strategy worked for success, and get inspiration for your own campaigns.

3X Leads for a Local Business – Vertex Marketing Social Media Case Study

This is a good case study about finding the right balance between organic reach with social media posts and paid reach with social media marketing ads. You’ll find out how Vertex Marketing helped a local kitchen and bath remodeling business increase the number of leads by 3X. As for the return on investment (ROI) for this campaign, each lead for the client was worth about $10,000. The result was 6,628 audience reach, $12.43 average cost per conversion, and 18 conversions.

235% Increase In Conversions with Facebook Ads Funnel – Marketing 360 Social Media Case Study

This is one of Marketing 360’s case study examples that demonstrates the effectiveness of a Facebook ads sales funnel for B2B marketing. An ads funnel is a series of social media advertisements that target a specific audience at each stage of the buyer’s journey. By mapping out the buyer’s journey and creating a social media marketing ad campaign for each stage, you can guide new leads through the sales funnel and turn them into paying customers. This case study resulted in a 235% increase in conversions for a truck lift manufacturer.

15% Increase In Social Media Followers In 6 Months – Hootsuite Social Media Case Study

This is one of the best social media marketing case studies available online for businesses in the hospitality industry. Find out how Meliá Hotels International incorporated social media directly into its business model, both as a channel for client communication and as a platform to listen and learn about client needs and preferences. As a result, Meliá Hotel’s social media following grew from 5 million to 6 million in six months; an increase of more than 15%.

The Impact of Social Signals On SEO – Fat Stacks Social Media Case Study

This is a good case study for understanding the effect social media can have on SEO. By building links for a web page on social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc, the rankings for long tail keywords improved in Google’s search engine.

96 Link Clicks for a Vacation Rental – Maria Peagler Social Media Case Study

As the title of this social media case study example suggests, you’ll learn how Maria Peagler helped a vacation rental get 96 clicks out of 3,274 audience reach on a single Facebook ad; about a 2.9% click-through rate (CTR). What’s most important about this B2C example is those clicks were of the highest quality the client could receive because Maria dug into the analytics to find out the best time during the day to post the ad and the perfect age groups to target while also using specific language to only drive clicks that would more likely convert.

Vienna Tourist Board Uses an Instagram Wall to Attract Tourists – Walls.io Social Media Case Study

Inside this case study, you’ll find out how the City of Vienna uses a simple social media content aggregator to display its Instagram feed on the website. This basic marketing strategy harnesses the power of user-generated content to gain more followers and keep in touch with previous visitors to increase brand awareness and repeat visits.

Complete Instagram Marketing Strategy for Sixthreezero – Vulpine Interactive Social Media Case Study

This is an in-depth case study on social media marketing with Instagram. You’ll discover how Vulpine Interactive was able to turn an existing, unmanaged account into a strong company asset for Sixthreezero, a bicycling company that uses ecommerce to drive sales. There was a lot of strategy and planning that went into growing the account by 39%, increasing website traffic from Instagram by over 300%, and achieving 77,659 total engagements. Inside, you’ll get the complete social strategy, tactics, key performance indicators (KPIs), and results

Twitter Marketing Success Stories – Social Media Case Study

If you’re looking for social media case study examples for Twitter using both organic and paid ads, then this page has everything you need. It includes Twitter’s top marketing success stories for you to get new ideas for your own B2C and B2B marketing campaigns.

How 3 Big Brands Use Pinterest for Marketing – SmartInsights Social Media Case Study

This is a case study page by SmartInsights with an overview of how 3 big brands use Pinterest for marketing. Although it’s a quick read, you can learn some valuable tactics that Nordstrom, Sephora, and Petplan are using to market their brands on this social media platform.

25+ TikTok Social Campaign Results – Chatdesk Social Media Case Study

If you’re looking for the best social media case studies for TikTok, then this list by Chatdesk is an excellent resource. It includes more than 25 examples from big brands like Starbucks, Redbull, Spikeball, Crocs, Guess Jeans, and Gym Shark. Give it a read to find out exactly how these brands use TikTok effectively to scale their businesses.

Reddit for Business: Meet Your Maker – Social Media Case Study

Want to learn how to use Reddit to market your business online? This new social media marketing case study page by Reddit called “Meet Your Maker” showcases the people behind some of the most innovative and creative brand activations on our platform. Examples include campaigns by Adobe, Capcom, and noosa Yoghurt.

How Boston University Uses Snapchat to Engage with Students – Social Media Case Study

With more than 75% of college students using Snapchat on a daily basis, it became clear that Boston University had to make this platform a primary marketing channel. This social media case study outlines all of the top strategies Boston University uses to connect with prospective and current students.

Now, if you’re looking for more digital marketing ideas, then make sure to check out these other related guides:  SEO case studies with data on improving organic search engine optimization, PPC case studies  for paid search examples, email marketing case studies , affiliate marketing case studies , content marketing case studies , and general digital marketing case studies .

What Is a Social Media Case Study?

A social media case study is an in-depth study of social media marketing in a real-world context. It can focus on one social media tactic or a group of social media strategies to find out what works in social media marketing to promote a product or service.

Are Case Studies Good for Social Media Marketing?

Case studies are good for social media because you can learn about how to do social media marketing in an effective way. Instead of just studying the theory of social media, you can learn from real examples that applied social media marketing methods to achieve success.

Summary for Social Media Marketing Case Studies

I hope you enjoyed this list of the best social media marketing case study examples that are based on real-world results and not just theory.

As you discovered, the social media case studies above demonstrated many different ways to perform well on social platforms. By studying the key findings from these case study examples, and applying the methods learned to your own accounts, you can hopefully achieve the same positive outcome. New social media case studies are being published every month and I’ll continue to update this list as they become available. So keep checking back to read the current sources of information on social media.

MFIA Clinic Lawsuit Succeeds in Lifting Gag Rules at Pittsburgh Jail

In a win for government accountability in Pennsylvania, the Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic at Yale Law School and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press have succeeded in lifting Allegheny County Jail rules that forbid employees from talking to the press or posting information on social media.

As part of a settlement reached in the federal First Amendment lawsuit on April 23, the Pittsburgh jail has adopted new policies that affirm employees’ right to speak and to disclose wrongdoing at the jail. The policies also empower jail employees to speak out to the press on matters of public concern.

“We’re confident that these new policies secure the rights of journalists and the jail’s employees.” — Federico Roitman ’25

The clinic brought the case on behalf of reporter Brittney Hailer and worked with Reporters Committee staff attorney Paula Knudsen Burke as local counsel. The complaint alleged that the jail’s gag rules violated Hailer’s rights to gather and report on the news and the jail’s employees’ rights to speak on matters on public concern.

The now-abandoned policies broadly prohibited employees from speaking to the press without the warden’s permission. They also required employees to hold all jail matters “confidential,” significantly hampering Hailer’s ability to report on conditions at the jail. MFIA’s suit alleged that these policies violate the First Amendment rights of the public and press, as well as the rights of the jail’s staff.

“This case challenged an overreaching policy that prevented all employees from talking to the press,” said Victoria Maras ’25, who worked on the case. “We worked with the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) to bring this case as a means of demonstrating that the First Amendment does not tolerate government agencies gagging their employees in this way. SPJ is particularly concerned about this issue because similar policies are being rolled out around the country, and hopefully the jail’s withdrawal of its broad rules will send a message that such restrictions on employee speech are not defensible.”

The settlement was mediated by retired Magistrate Judge Lisa Pupo Lenihan under a mandatory mediation program in the Western District of Pennsylvania. After several rounds of negotiation, the two sides chalked out new press policies for the jail. Among other things, those new rules declare that jail employees may speak on matters of public concern as private citizens on their own time and are not restricted from revealing impropriety or wrongdoing by an employee.

This settlement and the resulting policy changes send a clear message that jail employees and contractors who want to speak publicly or with the press in their capacity as private citizens have a First Amendment right to do so.”  — Paula Knudsen Burke, Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press

“This settlement and the resulting policy changes send a clear message that jail employees and contractors who want to speak publicly or with the press in their capacity as private citizens have a First Amendment right to do so,” said Burke, the Pennsylvania Local Legal Initiative attorney for the Reporters Committee. “Meaningful accountability and oversight depends upon the public’s ability to access information about what is happening inside of correctional facilities. We are glad to have reached a resolution with Allegheny County that will help ensure that, moving forward, our client and other journalists can receive information about issues of public concern from those who wish to discuss them.”

The new policies, one of which explicitly includes documentary filmmakers and freelance journalists covered by its press access provisions, will take effect 30 days from the date of signing the settlement.

“Working on this case was an excellent chance to get practical experience being a part of a mediation, which is not something you often get to do in law school,” Isaac Barnes May ’24 said. “Mediation provides a way to resolve the case by bringing together all parties, talking through differences, and developing solutions that everyone can live with.”

As part of the mediation process, MFIA’s students undertook a 50-state survey of jail press policies.

“We took inspiration from the best examples we encountered,” Federico Roitman ’25 said. “We’re confident that these new policies secure the rights of journalists and the jail’s employees.”

The Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic at Yale Law School is a law student clinic dedicated to increasing government transparency, defending the essential work of news gatherers, and protecting freedom of expression by providing pro bono legal services, pursuing impact litigation and developing policy initiatives.

In the Press

What the pro-palestinian protesters on college campuses actually want, supreme court hears arguments in trump immunity claims, racial discrimination lawsuit against va could be watershed moment for black veterans, ‘the stakes are enormous’: legal expert on trump immunity case, related news.

New Study Finds Mental Harm Inflicted on Myanmar’s Rohingya a Form of Genocide

Anne Alstott ’87 Elected to American Academy of Arts & Sciences

Soros Fellowship for New Americans Announces 2024 Recipients

2024 Theses Doctoral

Modeling User Engagement on Online Social Platforms - A Context-Aware Machine Learning Approach

Peters, Heinrich

This dissertation examines the predictability of user engagement on online social platforms by integrating theoretical perspectives from the literature on media and technology habits with principles of context-aware computing. It presents three studies, each targeting a different facet of technology-mediated communication, from social media use in general to more granular behaviors like active and passive use and instant messaging. The first chapter proposes a novel approach to the study of social media habits through predictive modeling of sequential smartphone user behaviors. Using longitudinal smartphone app log data, it examines the predictability of app engagement as a way to capture a critical yet previously neglected aspect of media and technology habits: their embeddedness in repetitive behavioral sequences. The study employs Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and transformer neural networks to demonstrate that social media use follows predictable patterns over time and that its predictability varies substantially across individuals. T he second chapter shifts focus to the potential of context-aware modeling as a holistic yet parsimonious and privacy-preserving approach to predicting user engagement on online social platforms. Analyzing over 100 million Snapchat sessions from nearly 80,000 users via deep LSTM neural networks, the study demonstrates the predictability of active and passive use based on past behavior and a notable improvement in predictive performance upon integrating momentary context information. Features related to connectivity status, location, temporal context, and weather were found to capture non-redundant variance in user engagement relative to features derived from histories of in-app behaviors. The findings are consistent with the idea of context-contingent, habit-driven patterns of active and passive use, highlighting the utility of contextualized representations of user behavior for predicting user engagement on online social platforms. The third chapter investigates the predictability of attentiveness and responsiveness in instant messaging on a large online social platform. Utilizing metadata from over 19 million messages, the study examines the predictive power of a wide range of predictor groups, including message attributes, user attributes, and momentary context, as well as historical communication patterns within ego networks and dyadic relationships. The findings echo the overarching theme that habitual behaviors and contextual factors shape user engagement. However, in this case, dyad-specific messaging histories account for the overwhelming share of explained variance, underlining the socially interdependent nature of user engagement in instant messaging. Collectively, the three studies presented in this dissertation make a theoretical contribution by establishing media and technology habits as a suitable framework for the study of user engagement and by introducing a novel perspective that emphasizes the repetitive, predictable, and context-dependent nature of media and technology habits. The research makes an important empirical contribution through the use of novel, large-scale, objective behavioral data, enhancing the ecological validity and real-world applicability of its findings. Methodologically, it pioneers the use of context-aware sequential machine learning techniques for the study of media and technology habits. The insights garnered from this research have the potential to inform the design of engaging and ethical online social platforms and mobile technologies, highlighting its practical implications for the billions of users navigating these digital environments on a daily basis.

• Instant messaging
• Computer science
• Social media
• Machine learning
• Neural networks (Computer science)
• Longitudinal method
• Snapchat (Electronic resource)

This item is currently under embargo. It will be available starting 2026-04-21.

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• Published: 26 April 2024

Perpetrators in multimodal media discourse: a case study of personalization in images from The Telegraph

• Svitlana Shurma   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-2183-2338 1  

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications volume  11 , Article number:  535 ( 2024 ) Cite this article

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• Cultural and media studies
• Language and linguistics

The article deals with the visual and linguistic representation of alleged perpetrators through personalization in news reporting from The Telegraph ’s online media platform. The analysis shows how visual message, along with verbal labelling in the text, represent different groups of alleged perpetrators as more or less ‘dangerous’ in news reports. Agency is analyzed through a focus on the lens range and its influence on perceived social distance, the angle of the shot and its role in the understanding of social relations, as well as the direction of an alleged perpetrator’s gaze in images as a way of social interaction with the viewer. The photos of alleged perpetrators appear in The Telegraph with the aim of informing the public about the danger these individuals pose, as well as legitimizing the actions of law enforcement institutions. It appears that verbal and visual identification of these individuals is done with the intention of ‘excluding’ the most dangerous social actors, such as ‘murderers’, from ingroups.

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Introduction.

The relation between the visual and verbal in news media reporting is usually defined by framing. It is viewed as a key “multimodal principle” (Kress and van Leeuwen 2001 , 3), or a set of “organizing principles that are socially shared and persistent over time, that work symbolically to meaningfully structure the social world” (Reese 2001 , 11).

Framing is a term used in social sciences and humanities with some variations in meaning. In media discourse, framing is understood as a technique that is used by media to enhance meaning aspects by making certain elements of discourse more salient than others (Entman 1993 , 52; Kress and van Leeuwen 2001 , 2; Maalej 2019 , 37). In a way, such perspecitivization determines the “power of communicating text” (Entman 1993 , 51).

Entman ( 1993 , 53) identified the functions of frames: “selection and highlighting, and use of the highlighted element to construct an argument about problems and their causation, evaluation, and/or solution”. For example, the mother of a terminally ill child, committing an act of euthanasia, may be presented to readers as a killer or a savior through verbal and visual supplement. At the same time, the way readers’ personal beliefs and feelings may be affected by this presentation depends on the schemata already existing in their cognitive systems (Entman 1993 , 53; Scheufele 1999 ): a Christian might support the mother’s presentation as a murderer, while a more liberal reader or someone facing a similar family problem might feel a need to disagree.

In media, the framing of social actors is often connected with the valence encoded in the message (D’Angelo 2017 , 1). Standards of reporting usually rely on conventions that influence the framing process (D’Angelo 2017 , 2). For example, in shaping their news, The Daily Telegraph Footnote 1 depends on the Independent Press Standards Footnote 2 , which safeguard the ways that certain sensitive issues of public domain are to be reported. Thus, through framing mass media can potentially set the patterns of interpretation associated with specific social actors (van Leeuwen 2005b , 74). The media portrayal/framing of various social actors has been addressed in a number of scholarly publications (see e.g., Johnston and Noakes 2005 ; Norris 2011 ; Haynes and Hennig 2011 ; Journal of Perpetrator Research , etc.).

According to Machin and Mayr ( 2013 , 77), “in any language there exists no neutral way to represent a person.” It is impossible to avoid linguistic evaluation ( sensu Nevala 2019 , 22) along with visual one when it comes to reporting about such sensitive public issues as violent acts. Apart from the two main parties involved in violence, perpetrators and victims, often law enforcement or government representatives, witnesses and friends/family are given voice to in media discourse. If “moral evaluations can be connoted visually or represented by visual symbols” (van Leeuwen 2008a , 120), then discourse, possibly shaped by the ideologies, through its ability to “embody affect” (van Dijk 2000 , 21), might, or rather would, potentially tend to connect the representation of social actors with emotional and evaluative appeal. Yet, though it may seem simple to label the perpetrator, for example, as “evil” or “bad”, and the victim as “good”, the reality is not that simple. For example, the public would most probably support a perpetrator who committed homicide in the act of self-defense. Therefore, to reflect an attitude, the media ascribes social agency by using specific linguistic and visual structures (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006 , 76–78).

The linguistic representation of social actors described in detail by Theo van Leeuwen ( 1996 ; 2008b ) has become an analytical tool for many CDA studies. This scholar has focused on a “ sociosemantic inventory of the ways in which social actors can be represented” (van Leeuwen 1996 , 32). Machin and Mayr ( 2013 , Ch. 4) applied the approach to multimodal discourse, focusing on those aspects of the model that can be applied to the analysis of visual data.

Stemming from the linguistic data, van Leeuwen ( 2008b ) identifies two major linguistic strategies in the representation of social actors in media discourse: inclusion and exclusion. “Representations include or exclude social actors to suit their interests and purposes in relation to the readers for whom they are intended” (van Leeuwen 2008b , 274). Linguistically, social actors which are chosen to be included in the texts, could be represented through personalization or impersonalization (van Leeuwen, 2008b , 292–294; Machin and Mayr 2013 , 79–80). The former refers to verbal representation of social actors as human beings (e.g., through nomination, functionalization, etc.), while the latter means using linguistic expressions to refer to social actors by way of, for example, abstraction or objectivation (van Leeuwen 2008b , 286, 288, 292). When it comes to visual representation, the choice of visual supplements also depends on the “ideological requirements” (Machin and Mayr 2013 , 102) the newspaper pursues. Unlike the linguistic choices, visual supplements are often more limited in their semiotic potential due to certain restrictions such as space and text arrangement, among others. Therefore, the inclusion of social actors via the choices of visual supplements becomes often more meaningful than their exclusion, or absence of visual representation. “[S]election is an inevitable part of every act of making a photographic image and displaying it to the public. Hence its special relevance for the process of visual framing” (Messaris and Abraham 2010 , 218). In fact, the inclusion of images may compensate for the lack of certain information in the verbal message, enhance emotional impact, support the ideology and message, and so on. From the perspective of framing, inclusion is also of greater importance than exclusion itself since it becomes a part of a cognitive solution (Gillespie et al. 2013 , 227), an analytical picture (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006 , 89) offered to the reader through elements that become salient. Present case study focuses solely on the articles where the images of the alleged perpetrators were included to accompany the text of the articles. With regard to visual imagery, the term ‘personalization’ is used herein to refer to visual representations of social actors as identifiable humans through their culturally recognized role or verbal personalization in the article text. The visual structures underlying the framing of personalized social actors in images include social distance (via the length of camera shot), social relation (angle of camera) and social interaction (‘offer’ and ‘demand’ images depending on the direction of the gaze of the perpetrator) with the viewer (van Leeuwen, 2008a , 138–141). The shot range allows the interpreter to talk about the closeness of the social actor to the viewer, focusing on the so-called “symbolic distance” (van Leeuwen 2008a , 138). The vertical angle of the camera reflects the involvement or detachment with the represented perpetrator, while the vertical angle could be used to represent their position of “symbolic power” (van Leeuwen 2008a , 139). The direction of the perpetrator’s gaze towards or away from the viewer grants the distinction of ‘offer’ images, which position the public as “voyeurs”, and ‘demand’, which make the viewer look directly into the eyes of the social actor, address the viewer with the aim of further interpretation (van Leeuwen 2008a , 141).

What should be noted, too, is that linguistic/visual inclusion and exclusion should not be confused with ingroup inclusion and exclusion (e.g., Pickett & Brewer 2004 ; Nesdale 2011 ). While the former are the elements of text manipulation via framing discussed above, the latter concerns social group preferences and biases that influence individual’s membership or exclusion from such social groups.

This paper aims at outlining the strategies of framing perpetrators, as a group of social actors, visually, via verbal mediation, through the lens of van Leeuwen’s idea of ‘personalization’ applied to verbal identification and visual representation in news reports. The cases study of The Telegraph alleged perpetrator representation addresses the question of how the “discourse becomes a tool for claims and imputations of social identity” (Jones and Norris 2005 , 4) of an individual labelled in the discourse as a perpetrator. The study attempts to bring together two approaches: (critical) discourse-analytical approach (e.g., Kress and van Leeuwen 2001 ; van Leeuwen 2008a ; Jones 2012 ; Tannen et al. 2015 ) and social semiotic one (e.g., van Leeuwen 2005a ; Kress and van Leeuwen 2006 ; Caple 2006 ; Kress 2010 ). A more focused framework of Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA) (Chouliaraki 2006 ; Machin and Mayr 2013 ; Djonov and Zhao 2016 ) allows analysis of both the visual and verbal message from the perspective of power imbalance and ideology. It also helps to trace how the construal of the alleged perpetrator’s representation shifts along the ‘safety’ ⇔ ‘danger’ axis. Agency, which is an important focus of MCDA, is analyzed from two perspectives: (1) how selected social actors are visually (and verbally) represented, as well as (2) how engagement with the viewer happens. Though MCDA has been criticized for its subjectivity (see, e.g., Wodak 1999 ; Wooffitt 2005 ), the usage of methodology borrowed from other disciplines, such as Social Semiotics, could help to redress the limitation. This suggested merging of methodologies could help to uncover implicit attitudes and perceptions in communication practices that involve representations of social actors. The case study thus could be of interest to reporters as well as discourse studies scholars and students.

Materials and methods

The Telegraph is the online counterpart to the British ‘right-leaning broadsheet’ The Daily Telegraph . The digital version has an accessible-upon-subscription archive of articles Footnote 3 . The Telegraph is often characterized as a “populist,” “pro-Christian” newspaper focusing generally on soft news and human-interest stories (Baker et al. 2013 , 7, 9–10, 23), which could potentially influence the representation of perpetrators based on the type of crime they are accused of. The chosen images accompanying news stories dealing with different forms of violence were collected from the News Section of The Telegraph online archive as of January 2010. The definition of violence by the World Health Organization is applied to the material: “The intentional use of physical force or power, threatened or actual, against oneself, another person, or against a group or community, that either results in or has a high likelihood of resulting in injury, death, psychological harm, maldevelopment or deprivation” (WHO 2002 , 4). Thematically, the chosen articles deal with the following forms of violence: terrorism and terrorist threats, violent attacks including rape, domestic abuse, alleged preparation for violent acts, and murder.

The corpus was created of the articles accompanied with the photographs that portrayed alleged perpetrators as indicated by linguistic cues, i.e. in captions or the news stories themselves. These photos will be generally referred to as ‘images’ because some of them were digitally manipulated before publication. For example, the Reuters photograph of Osama bin Laden in The Telegraph article “Osama bin Laden tape: working an ‘indicator’ of attack” Footnote 4 appeared on other web resources flipped horizontally (see aawsat.com or abc.net.au). The corpus also includes courtroom sketches, as in the article “Ellington attacks: battle rages over ‘Broken Britain’” of 22 January 2010. A comparative analysis of the representations of other types of social actors will become the focus of further studies.

Strategies for the framing of alleged perpetrators were analyzed through the application of three dimensions salient for presenting them in the material collected. ‘Offer’ and ‘demand’ images allow to interpret social interaction between the alleged perpetrator and the viewer. Within these categories, social distance (the range at which people are shown) and social relation of the participants of discourse (camera angle) (van Leeuwen 2008a , 138–141) are further discussed.

The total number of images analyzed was 95. The images selected appeared below a headline and standfirst, and featured a caption providing context for the image. In articles with more than one image, we focused only on the one immediately visible to the reader below the headline or standfirst. The articles were accessed Footnote 5 and the data collected from June 2019 to February 2020, prior to the changes in The Telegraph ’s subscription policy.

The study builds on insights provided by MCDA (Chouliaraki 2006 ; Machin and Mayr 2013 ; Ledin and Machin 2018 ), a model which in turn relies on Social Semiotics methodology (van Leeuwen 2005a , 2008a , b ; Kress and van Leeuwen 2001 , 2006 ). In MCDA, “we explore the way that individual elements in images, such as object and settings are able to signify discourse in ways that might not be obvious at an initial viewing” (Machin and Mayr 2013 , 31). The present analysis seeks to examine how The Telegraph frames the ways that sensemaking takes place via personalization. Framing consists of ideological and culturally-driven choices that result in the selection and composition of images that accompany violence-related articles, and which affect socially-constructed meaning. In line with D’Angelo ( 2017 , 5), we follow a three-step frame analysis to identify stereotypical framing features with regard to reporting on violence: (1) identifying linguistic labels and visual presentation features; (2) examining discourse patterns and image attributes; and (3) providing a content analysis of narrative conventions.

Results: personalization in The Telegraph images

Below specific elements of the visual representation of perpetrators in images are examined, with the focus on the aspects of social distance and relation via social interaction. The corpus shows that the direction of the alleged perpetrators’ gaze is the most salient feature in the images accompanying the articles on violence in The Telegraph , and all 95 images can be divided into ‘offer’ (42 images) and ‘demand’ (53 images). Closer inspection demonstrates that within each of the groups the range of the shot (distance) is the next most salient feature which influences the interpretation of social distance to the represented social actor. And finally, the angle of viewing the alleged perpetrators in ‘offer’ and ‘demand’ images guides the interpretation of the intended symbolic social relations with the social actor(s). The results are summarized in Table 1 :

Demand images

The alleged perpetrators are depicted in 95 images that supplement the texts of the articles dealing with various types of violence. Of these, 42 are demand images, in which the alleged perpetrators are connected with violence in the linguistic context mainly through direct ‘nominations’ or action verbs in headlines, e.g., “female suicide bombers” (23.01 Footnote 6 ), standfirsts, e.g., “13-year-old boy who raped” (27.01), or captions, e.g., “Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden” (25.01).

Social distance

As stated earlier, social distance is connected with the size of the figure in the image, or proximity/distance. In the corpus, it was possible to identify close-ups (34 images) and mid-range (8) shots as they appear in the webpages of The Telegraph .

Among the close-ups showing (part of) the face or head with the upper shoulders of the alleged perpetrators, the viewer has a chance to look closely into the eyes of a “teenager jailed for killing 12-year-old sister” (9.01), “serial rapist” (27.01), “terror suspect” (27.01), “merchant of death” (23.01) and others. Twenty-two individuals in the photos are the alleged perpetrators accused of killing or causing substantial harm (e.g., rapists), while other 7 are suspects, accused celebrities, recruits and one “‘lone wolf’ BNP member” (15.01). Of these, 18 are shots that appear to be taken from driving licenses or police booking photos (e.g., “teenage criminal” (21.01), “murderer Graham Dean” (23.01), “suspected US serial rapist” (29.01), or “Detroit bomber” (3–7.01, 22.01, 28.01)). What seems salient in these images is the eyes of the offenders, since at a short viewing distance the salient features of the face are important (Hakala et al. 2016 , 3). In 20 demand portraits, the salience is also signaled by the edges of the frame, which cut off the upper part of the head/forehead and/or part of the chin and neck. If we assume that such images imply a demand for a social relationship, then the intention of the producer is to make us cautious of those people, to make us look directly into the eyes of the “Detroit bomber” (7.01), “drugs baron” (3.01), or “most wanted terrorist” (15.01), as well as the subjects in other selected images. Interestingly, 18 shots are of males, of which 11 seem to be white Europeans. ‘Nomination’ (van Leeuwen 2008b , 286) is used in all the captions to the images to identify the represented social actors by their full names, e.g., Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab (3.01) and Kasha Peniston (9.01). The readers are given a chance to evaluate the perpetrators not only by their face, but also by their names.

To further identify the social actors, the headlines, standfirsts and sometimes captions (18 images) ascribe a role to the social actor through functionalization with nouns, verbs, or adjectives (van Leeuwen 2008b , 288). For instance, words like murder/murderer and their derivatives are used 11 times in the selected fragments, death/dead are used 9 times, and kill/killer 10 times. The social actors presented in such a way are alleged or convicted rapists (4 individuals), “killers” (12), including “mercy killers” (3), and terrorists or terror suspects (5). In this way, visual proximization is enhanced by linguistic proximization (see Cap 2010 ).

What additionally characterizes the demand images is the absence of background in many pictures (20 images in total). In five images, the background is blurred, as the subjects have been photographed outside, and elements of their outwear can be seen. Among these pictures, four are of women. One of them is a female “driver who killed” (24.01), two are so-called mercy killers identified in the verbal context through words like “death” and “murder” (7.01, 17.01), and one is “female suicide bomber” (23.01). The male photo is of a former jihadist “recruit” who has gone through “rehabilitation” (31.01). In these photos, the faces are slightly angled to the right or left, except for the “female terrorist” (23.01). What seems more important in the faces are the emotions expressed, not any other context.

Some pictures (16 in total) feature an identifiable background. A “drugs baron” is pictured against what seems to be a door or window (3.01), a British contractor “accused of murdering two colleagues” is wearing a helmet standing against some blue and red background (21.01), and in two pictures the “Detroit bomber” is standing against some vegetation wearing a Nike cap (7.02). These pictures, except “Terence Gavan, a ‘lone wolf’ BNP member” (15.01), “British contractor” (21.01) and “a mother suspected of murdering her two young children” (28.01), have been taken at a greater distance from the subject’s face. According to Yan et al. ( 2018 , 66), “human beings pay more attention to the objects and regions not only with dominant colors but also with close and compact spatial distribution.” Parts of images that are in contrast with their surroundings are detected on the basis of differences in color, intensity, and orientation (Achanta et al. 2008 , 67); therefore, there is a natural difference in how attention is distributed between a subject against a uniform or complicated background.

Two images stand out: portraits of perpetrators whose faces are masked. The first one depicts a “female terrorist” (23.01), while the second shows “a man accused of carrying out a series of acid attacks” (10.01). In the first image, the camouflaged woman’s face is framed in such a way that part of her forehead and chin are cut off, with the effect of making more salient the eyes and mouth, which are visible in the slits of the mask. Additionally, the mask and the background are darker, in contrast to the open parts of the face: the eyes and mouth. What might strike the viewer is the calmness of the relaxed mouth and the directness of the gaze. The effect of proximization makes the image quite striking, while linguistically the social actor is functionalized (van Leeuwen 2008b , 288) as a “female terrorist”. In the second picture, the eyes of the social actor are not really visible, but the position of the head and the hand with the right palm raised open to the viewer create the feeling that the criminal is looking straight at the camera. Unlike the previous photo, the mask is loose and moved to the right of the face. Here the subject is of smaller size in the image and the background includes members of the police.

A smaller group of demand images portray an alleged perpetrator with the victim (4 images). The separate images are placed next to each other (except for the image of Ronnie Wood and his girlfriend (2.01)): e.g., a mother alleged to have “murdered brain-damaged son” 18 featured with her son both looking directly at the viewer (26.01). In three images, the alleged perpetrator is positioned on the left and the victim on the right (Mantas Kraucevicius “found guilty of manslaughter” (30.01) is the only one whose image is positioned to the right of the victim). This group of portraits is arranged in line with traditional message distribution, i.e. the information given on the left side registers as familiar, while the right side conveys new information requiring special attention (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006 , 179–185). Compositionally, these portraits are arranged like the “mutual” gaze portraits, so the viewer “looks into the eyes” of both the alleged offender and victim.

Among mid-range demand images there are images of two men who are both alleged offenders and victims (29.01, 23.01, 27.01). These images, both of men who allegedly committed murder defending their families and properties, are featured against their properties. Among the demand images the longest range photo shows a head-to-waist portrayal of a “90-year-old Second World War veteran who grabbed care home worker by neck” (26.01). The man, who “denies assault”, is depicted standing in front of a gate with a sign reading “Canford Chase”, which is the care home where the incident took place. Compositionally, the man appears in the right half of the picture, which means that he is presented as new information to the viewer. Some of the individuals in demand images are celebrities, i.e. Ronnie Wood and Stan Kenton, and therefore they are presented to us as someone whose image we know. Interestingly, certain photos of perpetrators accused or convicted of particularly heinous or unusual crimes, especially murder, become so well known that the individuals become celebrities after recurring displays in the media (van Leeuwen 2008a , 108, 138–139), e.g., “Detroit bomber” or bin Laden.

Social relation

As can be seen from Table 1 , the majority (36) of the demand images appear at the same eye level as that of the projected viewer (van Leeuwen 2008a , 139). Demand images of this type seem to require our involvement in the situation, which is associated with crimes of various degrees of gravity. The viewer is invited, even compelled, to confront the perpetrators and assess them by their faces. In six images the camera appears slightly below the eye level of the alleged perpetrator or offender. For example, “the manager of a care home, who is accused of murdering two elderly residents” (27.01) is photographed outside with his wife from a slightly lower angle so he appears to be looking at the viewer from somewhat above. Along the horizontal angle, there are slightly more photographs showing the alleged perpetrators from the front (28 images) than from the side (14 images).

In society, violent perpetrators tend to be excluded from communities and treated as ‘others’ for what they have done; however, in the visual presentation, viewers are made to confront them, in a way that is usually negative. For instance, looking at the image of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab (3.01), we see that his head is tilted to the right and his expression is not that of someone who repents his wrongdoing. This could potentially result in a negative perception of the accused, especially when coupled with the label provided by the article (“[t]he true picture of Islamic radicalism […]”). In other words, the images require more engagement: negative attention in response to a putative threat, or curiosity regarding the other, but not affinity, despite the symbolic closeness of the frame. These relationships to the viewer in demand images might, in a way, also be interpreted in terms of social exclusion, as the function of such images is to identify individuals doomed to be excluded from the relative in-group of ‘good citizens’.

Offer images

Fifty-three offer images that depict alleged perpetrators mentioned in the articles were singled out. In this group of photos, “a real or imaginary barrier is erected between the represented participants and the viewers, a sense of disengagement, in which the viewer must have the illusion that the represented participants do not know they are being looked at, and in which the represented participants must pretend that they are not being watched” (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006 , 120). Viewers are allowed to project their own narratives onto the subject to a greater degree.

Offer images (see Table 1 ) of perpetrators generally appear in longer range shots varying from head-to-shoulder/chest (28 images of 53 total), head-to-waist/hip (13), head-to-knee (3) to full-figure shots (9). A “continuous stream of social information” perceived by the viewer can include elements other than gaze, such as a person’s identity, markers of emotion, attractiveness, and other elements (Leopold and Rhodes 2010 , 234). Verbal extra-photographic codes create a top-down approach to reading the image (Noorman et al. 2018 ). In our case, the social actors are placed in situations in which the emotional markers of the portrayed social actor are salient (Adams and Kleck 2005 ).

Head-to-shoulder/chest photos comprise 28 offer images which include images where the frame cuts part of the head of the alleged perpetrator and sometimes chin (8 images): Chemical Ali (25.01), Osama bin Laden (24–25.01), two images of ‘mercy killer’ Kay Gilderdale – one with her “seriously ill daughter” (26.01) and one alone (23, 25, 28.01), – “former UN inspector” (14.01), “‘Lady in the Lake’ killer” (25.01), “a wealthy landowner” (26.01), and “ex-army major” (5.05). Unlike similarly framed demand images, these 8 offer images have a brighter and more prominent background – none of them is a police shot or a document photo. Additionally, of these, a portrait of Osama bin Laden also appears among the demand images. In an offer image, Osama bin Laden is portrayed with a turban on his head, his left hand up, his mouth open as if speaking; he is set against a background that appears to contain Arabic writing. Kay Gilderdale attracted media attention for “attempting to murder her bedridden daughter” and being found not guilty (25.01). In the image with her daughter, she is pictured looking down, keeping her face close to the alleged victim, who is looking at the viewer. In this case, the victim is positioned to the right, and the engagement of the viewer is with her, but not her mother.

Other social actors appear in the number of head-to-shoulder/chest images. In four head-to-shoulder/chest images law enforcement agents are present, e.g., Amy Winehouse with two police officers (21.01). In two court sketches the figure of the “Detroit bomber” (8.01, 9.01) is somewhat disproportionally bigger than the image of the judge. “Taliban chief Hakimullah Mehsud” (17.01, 31.01) is captured with other militants in the background. Blurred images of people in the background are found in three more images (2.01, 19.01, 22.01).

Other alleged perpetrators in head-to-shoulder/chest photos (9) appear against various backgrounds. For example, Munir Hussain – also appearing in demand images – “freed from prison” where he was kept for “attacking a burglar” is featured in his car and in front of his home (20.10). The head-to-chest shots are predominantly wide-angled, except for the image of a “radical preacher” (4.01).

Mid- and long-range shots are generally used to include more than one social actor. The longer range allows to include more than one member. Of head-to-waist/hip images, six feature law-enforcement agents doing their duty of arresting/detaining the alleged perpetrator(s), e.g., “alleged members of a drug traffickers gang” are photographed with the Mexican Federal Police behind their backs (10.01). Militants of Nigeria (12.01), Shehab rebels (3.01) and Al-Qaeda members are captured holding weapons in groups. One image presents Pope John Paul II shaking hands with the “Turkish gunman” (11.01). A still from Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (13.01), “a Yemen soldier” (15.01) and a photo of the “self-confessed killer” (29.01) show single figures.

A head-to-knee sketch shows “the mother of one of the Edlington victims in an outburst after the boys were sentenced” (22.01) and the perpetrator turning his head towards her. Camouflaged “Nigeria rebels” (30.01) and “crime gangs” of Port-au-Prince (19.01) are photographed armed. These people are presented to us as more distant, as strangers (van Leeuwen 2008a , 139).

Long-range shots (9 in total) are reserved for groups of social actors: “$10 Taliban” (28.01), immigrants taking part in a protest demonstration (12.01), and the “senior leadership of al-Qaeda” (3.01). Seven of the images show men with various weapons. None of these social actors are of white European origin. The distance symbolically points to these outgroups as a threat.

Unlike demand images, offer images are more varied in terms of the shot angles from which social actors are depicted. Along the vertical axis, alleged perpetrators are presented at the eye level (27 images), from below (22) and from above (4). Forty-six images show social actors in question from the side, and only seven from the front. The alleged perpetrators presented in such a way range from common people allegedly committing murders, such as “Mother Kay Gilderdale [who was] found not guilty of murder” (25.01), “a wealthy landowner accused of murdering wife” (26.01), and a “jealous woman” (7.01), to organized crime and terrorists, who came into the focus of public attention through a chain of earlier reports, such as “one of the country’s most-wanted drug lords” (12.1) and the “Detroit bomb suspect” (8.1) or “Detroit bomber” (9.1), as well as famous public figures, including “Martin Amis, the novelist” (24.1) and Amy Winehouse (21.1). The head-to-shoulders portraits show people whose faces are angled away from the camera to the left or right in varying degrees. Such “sideline” positions (van Leeuwen 2008a , 139) shift the public away from a need to confront the alleged perpetrators. Images with law enforcement agents in view, which also tend to be mid-range shots, let the viewer know that the situation is being taken care of. Often these agents are also placed slightly behind or around the alleged perpetrator, making their image more salient against the uniforms.

The majority of long-range shots (head-to-hip/knee or full-figure) feature groups of people or individuals, mainly labelled as dangerous in context or co-text, which is also reinforced visually by showing them holding guns (e.g., “Taliban suicide squad” (29.01), “senior leadership of al-Qaeda” (3.01), “men claiming to be al-Qaeda members” (11.01)). Interestingly, these photos are also taken from slightly or even noticeably lower angles, as if highlighting the danger by ascribing more power to the alleged perpetrators, a move which seems to work in a similar manner to the close-up in demand images. The difference, though, is in the intention to make them appear dangerous but also distant, as these are mainly groups from countries other than Britain.

While analyzing images, one should always remember that images are fragmentary in nature; therefore, they do not and cannot offer a wholistic representation of any object or person (Lowe 2019 , 221). The selection of an image and its properties to portray alleged perpetrators is based on a need to engage viewers in the process of viewing and interpretation, focusing on form and content as well as language. Our perception of the image of a kid among the autumn foliage, such as that of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, inevitably changes when he is linguistically labelled as the “Detroit bomber”. The language used as part of the caption, headline, or article guides the audience’s interpretation, but not necessarily in a conscious way. After all, “[l]anguage has the power to create and maintain reality because it is itself an ordering device, a nomos creating tool” (Groppe 1984 , 166).

At the same time, image manipulation through the choice of the range at which the person is photographed, the angle of viewing and symbolic interaction via the direction of the perpetrator’s gaze, projects the social actor as more or less dangerous. For instance, demand close-ups resembling or being police mug shots would inevitably carry a sense of danger associated with our schematic knowledge behind the situation when mug shots are made. Similarity the visual representation of the “Detroit bomber” Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab (5.01), “a teenager who sexually assaulted a nine-year-old girl” (27.01), another “teenage criminal” who kicked terminally ill man to death (21.01), and nurse Colin Norris who murdered “four frail patients” (26.01) frames these people as equally dangerous.

Several aspects seem to influence the choice of framing. Geographical and/or political proximity is one of them and it explains why the newspaper gives so much attention to the “Detroit bomber” prosecuted in the USA but mainly portrayed in close-ups in the news, compared to other terrorists and terrorist organizations such as Al-Qaeda or “Nigeria rebels” who are photographed from a larger distance at a slightly or visibly lower angles, often in groups and with arms. The idea that “[t]here are two kinds of people in the world – criminals and good upstanding citizens/victims” (McKee 2003 , 103) finds its way into the representation of alleged perpetrators according to the symbolically assumed degree of the gravity ascribed to their allegedly criminal deeds. It looks like the greater the danger, or rather, the worse the perception of the crime in Western society (in our corpus, Britain, US, Australia, majorly), the closer viewers are to the individual alleged perpetrator and the greater their perception of the threat. The dramatic or rhetorical effect of the images’ take on social relation seems to promote the message that “they are similar to us; they are among us”, hence the positioning of the viewer at eye level. At the same time, the physical (geographical) distance from extremely dangerous groups (Al-Qaeda, Yemen) results in their presentation through a longer-range shot and somewhat lower angle. Additionally, police mug shots “symbolically include” the police (who should be taking these photos) and imply that the justice is being done or to be done. In a similar manner both offer and demand images of the alleged perpetrators along with the law enforcement agents in the frame, point to the importance of the role of these latter social actors in preventions of violence. Yet, the projection of the alleged perpetrators in these images seems to be different: the presence of the police removes or mitigates the aspect of danger this individual has for the society and promotes trust in the law enforcement. For instance, an offer image of “mafia mobster” Guiseppe Bastone with an Italian police officer behind him appears along with the article entitled “Italy claims finally defeating the mafia” (9.01). On the other hand, the images of the alleged terrorists and organizations seem to appear as part of the legitimization of the ‘war on terror’, an ongoing international campaign launched after the 9/11 attack – a campaign taking place outside the target reading communities of the newspaper.

Another factor which seems to influence symbolic distance and relation in the alleged perpetrator representation is the exposure of the readers to the story over a period of time. Repeated exposure to the names and images of notoriously known individuals make them ‘familiar’ to the readers, as Osama bin Laden or Taliban leader Mehsud. This seems to result in the closer range of the social actor presentation. Thus, The Telegraph reader/viewer becomes accustomed to the perception of a particular image associated with a specifically labelled social actor. The same holds true for the representation of celebrities labelled in the texts as alleged perpetrators, such as the offer close-up image of David Copperfield whose rape case was closed “without charges” (13.01) or the demand close-up of David Ross, “the millionaire Tory party donor” (12.01). Both of these men had the cases dropped, and they appear smiling in the images supplementing the news. The representation is quite different from the alleged perpetrators deemed as more dangerous, such as a “man jailed over death of Baby P” (21.01), who appears serious and reserved with his lips pressed. This ‘non-confrontational’ stance of Copperfield’s or Ross’ images can elicit a more sympathetic or at least neutral reception in contrast to the demand image, for example, of Baker. Among other things, interpretation relies on how facial expressions can be read. Alleged perpetrators’ faces (and sometimes their partial or full bodies) do not mediate production but are themselves the products of mass-media mediation, as many of the images are taken by professional photographers from (or cooperating with) various agencies, such as Reuters or The Telegraph itself. Additionally, perpetrators tend not to appear smiling or relaxed; the predominant emotion seems to be that of tension or indignation. Even if the alleged perpetrator is an “ex-army major jailed for grooming schoolgirls” (5.01) who appears to be smiling, the smile is only interpreted as one of contempt rather than happiness or any other positive emotion, and is set up to be perceived negatively in the context of the article and the labels used.

It is possible to project several potential communicative aims of making social distance short with the alleged perpetrators represented in close-ups: potential crime prevention by publishing images of accused or convicted offenders, vilification of targeted communities, such as “terrorist groups”, or simply telling an emotionally gripping story to “sell newspapers” (in this case, to encourage web traffic or link sharing to stimulate greater ad revenue), such as “Pope John Paul II gunman” who wants to publish a multi-million pound book (11.01).

Connection of the representation with the emotional/evaluative appeal also relies on ideologies. As a right-leaning pro-Christian newspaper, The Telegraph paid increased attention to the ‘mercy killers’. Dr. Jane Barton, who “faces action over morphine deaths of elderly patients” (17.01) and Frances Inglis, who got life sentence for “killing her severely disabled son” (7.01, 20.01, 22–23.01) are portrayed in demand close-up images. At the same time, “Mother Kay Gilderdale” who was acquitted of “murder attempt” of her terminally ill daughter is represented with her daughter or alone in an offer type of image. These three reported cases of female ‘mercy killers’ also reflect the societal debate about euthanasia. At the same time, The Telegraph ascribes social agency to these three actors by using linguistic clues of negative connotation, such as “murder” or “killing” talking about this form of violence.

Though law enforcement or other government representatives, witnesses, friends and family (except the photos where the alleged perpetrator is pictured with a victim, who is sometimes related to them as in case of Kay Gilderdale) are often excluded from the frame visually representing perpetrators, they are implicitly present in the interpretations of the images also through reference in the texts of the news reports.

One more case of variation in framing concerns the representation of “good upstanding citizens break[ing] the law” (McKee 2003 , 103). For example, Munir Hussain appears in both demand (23.01, 27.01) and offer (20.01) images with regard to manslaughter of a burglar in self-defense protecting his own property. He is portrayed in more intimate setting and at a mid-range distance. Such types of alleged perpetrators, whose act of violence is deemed an act of self-defense, whose contribution to the society is viewed as significant, or the charges against whom get eventually dropped are usually shown against more intimate or recognizable backgrounds, for example Colin Philpott, who allegedly “stabbed a teenager […] defending his family and property” (29.1) and was ultimately not charged.

Though mass-media platforms, The Telegraph is no exception, acquire and publish the images of alleged perpetrators to make them accessible to wider audiences, serving as a medium for circulation, the framing techniques applied to the images tend to follow some pattern. Even if the image is taken by a professional photographer from Reuters or Getty Images, or acquired from someone who knows the perpetrator, there is a tendency to keep a similar frame, for example, with a blurred background.

Inclusion of some images, especially, demand police/document shots, is used in the reports with what seems to be the intention to socially exclude the individuals from the ingroup. One way to make sure the exclusion happens is by mentioning the individuals’ names as well. By knowing the name and the face of the alleged perpetrator, law enforcement also makes sure they are recognized and reported, especially if they commit another crime. Such is the case of the “murderer who escaped prison three years ago” (23.01), who is depicted in a demand close up and whose name is mentioned in the caption. However, disclosing the alleged perpetrator’s name and face could also be harmful, especially if the person is acquitted later. If public opinion has already formed, the person could potentially suffer from the prejudice, as ingroup exclusion mostly happens in the media before the courts reach a verdict. Negative verbal labels used in the media can then stick with the person for years, if not for life. The debate over including/excluding the names and images of the perpetrators has been a part of the broader discussion of the journalistic ethical standards (see e.g., Toney 2015 ; Corbett 2017 ; Marthoze 2017 , etc.). Yet, as Toney, ( 2015 ) writes, the “codes of conduct (IPSO/Ofcom) and the law don’t always provide a sanctuary for editorial decision making”, and it is up to the individual newspaper to make a choice of disclosing personal information or not.

This case study of the strategies in framing of the alleged perpetrators as a group of social actors both visually and verbally showed how ‘personalization’ is achieved in The Telegraph news presentation. The alleged perpetrators are portrayed in The Telegraph news in a way that engages the audience through a mixture of visual manipulations and linguistic labels. Linguistic ‘nominalization’, or use of personal names, and mainly functionalization are used in the texts of the articles to define the role of the social actors and point to the act of violence committed, e.g., murderer, rapist, terrorist. As part of visual framing, salience is achieved through control of social relation, distance and interaction. The discourse serves as a tool which defines the position of social identity labelled in the discourse as a perpetrator along the ‘safety’ ⇔ ‘danger’ axis. Geographical and/or political proximity as well as legitimization of law enforcement/political actions plays an important role in the choice of visual framing: for instance, individuals presenting imminent danger to the reader mostly appear in close-up demand images, while distant terrorist groups tend to appear in long-range offer photographs.

To conclude, it appears that the function of the images of alleged perpetrators added to the message is two-fold: on the one hand, the image signals a warning to the audience about danger, but at the same time it legitimizes the legal actions necessary to safeguard public safety. After all, safety is one of the “apt categories” for understanding the media’s “power to represent the world to the world” (Chouliaraki 2006 , 4). Additionally, such framing fosters trust in the police, since such images show that law enforcement (or a governmental body associated with law and order) is able to assume or maintain control of a putatively dangerous subject. Frequently repeated media representation of accused terrorists, such as that of the “Detroit bomber” Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, also become a part of the legitimization of state actions (see Cap 2010 ), for example, in the ‘war on terror’. Ideology, to which the newspaper leans, influences social agency ascribed to individuals classified as ‘perpetrators’ in the discourse that the newspaper constructs. For instance, sometimes The Telegraph enters societal debates and contributes to them with the view the newspaper adheres to, such as the debate about euthanasia. In the long run, audiences acquire knowledge about cultural codes from a multitude of texts and then draw intertextual parallels unconsciously in their interpretative efforts (Ott and Walter 2000 , 429).

The case study presented here also has a number of limitations. First of all, it focused only on the representation of one type of social actors, i.e. alleged perpetrators. Yet, reports of violence also visually include other social actors, such as victims, law enforcement agents, on-lookers, etc., or exclude visual supplements altogether. In fact, “critical comparison of different representations of the same social practice” (van Leeuwen 2008a , 29) both via exclusion and inclusion could unveil further ideological interests and purposes the newspaper has with regard to its readers. Furthermore, though this case study does not allow to claim that the representation of alleged perpetrators is a fully established genre, the trends described and the function of the images in The Telegraph seem to indicate more than just a specific visual approach stemming from the nature of The Telegraph ideological stance as a populist, pro-Christian newspaper. A larger study across a variety of mass-media platforms is necessary.

At the same time, offering an interdisciplinary approach (combining the principles of social semiotics and CDA) allows an analyst to balance formalism/structuralism and contextualism in analyzing meaning making while reading and further interpreting visual and verbal signs used in media messages. Some scholars see Social Semiotics as a branch of CDA (e.g., Ghasemi 2023 ), or speak of Critical Social Semiotics (e.g., Caldas-Coulthard and van Leeuwen 2003 ) as an independent discipline, building upon Halliday’s approach to meaning potential based on social contexts. Focusing on how different semiotic resources organized in modes, which create a multimodal news report text, have different potential in meaning construction gives the scholar an opportunity to discuss not only social purposes but also sociocultural context around a violent event. Combining semiotic theory with sociological approach, critically analyzing social practices of constructing discourses, such as discourses on violence in focus here, provides a number of insights. For example, insight into the role(s) of framing, influenced by social and more specifically media platform preferences, favored propaganda, and adopted or represented ideology, in prompting, manipulating or regulating the way a society discusses and perceives alleged perpetrators.

Data availability

The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request. The bibliography of the primary sources used to generate datasets during and/or analysed during the current study are available in Harvard Dataverse https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/ZYG95J .

See The Telegraph ’s Editorial and Commercial Guidelines at https://www.telegraph.co.uk/about-us/editorial-and-commercial-guidelines/ .

See https://www.ipso.co.uk/editors-code-of-practice/ .

The material presented in the article was collected and analyzed before The Telegraph changed its free access policy. At present (2023), access to the archive is no longer free of charge.

See https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/7070363/Osama-bin-Laden-tape-wording-an-indicator-of-attack.html .

As of October 2020, the images could be assessed according to year and month at this address: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/archive/ .

Since all the images analyzed are of January 2010, the year is omitted in references.

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I am grateful to Dr. Katarína Nemčoková, Dr. Jeffrey Keith Parrott and Daniel Paul Sampey for the discussions and critique, as well as insights and guidance that helped to strengthen the manuscript.

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Shurma, S. Perpetrators in multimodal media discourse: a case study of personalization in images from The Telegraph . Humanit Soc Sci Commun 11 , 535 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-024-03040-2

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Received : 29 May 2023

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DOI : https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-024-03040-2

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