Communications of the ACM

tent on social media services like Twitter and Facebook. When probed, their objections stem less from conventional notions of privacy loss than from the loss of control of their own digital self-presentation. Digital self-presentation is subject to ongoing revision through deletion and curation of relevant online material. 7 Congruent with Samuelson’s analysis of personal data as intellectual property, 18 our study participants have felt a strong right to own and control their own digital footprints, regardless of the source of this content;

Reuse norms reflect some aspects of fair use and ignore others. Social norms for reuse reflect many of the nuanced concerns of fair use (such as limiting commercial reuse, and encouraging creative or educational use) but are more pragmatic and often more conservative, relying excessively on the mitigating effects of permission. Original intent and original context are often part of a calculus of circumstantial fairness;

A right to veracity. Our study participants take information veracity seriously, though they put excessive responsibility for it into the hands of infrastructure providers. Content removed in blatant self-interest falls under this rubric, and participants generally deny others the right to remove content if self-interest is the only rationale. Fairness and accuracy are, however, seen by the participants as part of a right to remove content; and

Highly circumstantial reason-
ing about reuse. Differences among
responses to the varying hypotheti-
cals demonstrate that participants’
sense of media rights may be highly
dependent on the actual reuse situa-
tion. This contextual sensitivity may
interact with labeling systems like
Creative Commons, since people may
be unable to conceive of the full range
of possible reuse scenarios or predict
which are most probable. As men-
tioned earlier, “permission” is some
participants’ go-to way of mitigating
unpredictable reuse. Not only does fair
use case law make such a workaround
unnecessary, it also does not scale to
viral reuse, and experience suggests
permission from the original content
creator is often unobtainable. 14

For example, Etsy artists may explicitly permit noncommercial use of their work, since they envision reuse that promotes their art. In so doing, they may fail to consider a popular crafts parody site that pokes fun at artisanal work. Although buyers flock to the artists’ stores as a result of their work’s exposure to a new audience (in line with their intent), artists may still feel indignant about the nature of the reuse. To complicate matters further, the parody site donates its proceeds to charity, so the sting is mixed with social good. Content creators are thus faced with complex trade-offs. Whether reuse restrictions are implemented through technology, policy, or a combination of the two, managing rights relies crucially on the ability of content owners to envision plausible reuse scenarios and predict which are most likely.

In Code: Version 2.0, Lessig6 iden-
tified four constraints that regulate
is necessary. Study participants also
expressed intolerance for content re-
moval motivated by self-interest.

Conclusion

We designed these eight studies, conducted over the course of five years, to elicit attitudes about how user-contributed content may be saved, reused, and removed by people other than the content’s most obvious owner. The results reveal how far public attitudes have strayed from conventional legal concepts and how much they are tied to media type and other circumstantial factors. Yet these attitudes are surprisingly robust, regular, and predictable, suggesting emerging norms for the ownership and control of social media.

Among the highlights of our findings, which can be media-type-specific, are five recurring social norms:

Save anything but respect explicit social constraints. Study participants have felt they have the right to save almost anything they encounter on the open web. They reject notions of artificially imposed limits on the right to save content but also respect the explicit constraints introduced by a social network like Facebook. Social distance imposes a strong effect on whether a person can save personal information posted on Facebook. Even the powers of a friend of a friend are limited. Ownership effects are thus stronger inside social networking services than they are outside, on the open Web;

Concern for control of self-presentation. Participants object to proposals for the institutional archiving of public con-

Figure 3. Content-removal norms comparing five potential actors. Hypotheticals refer to a scenario in which an unfavorable book review submitted by a child was actually written by the child’s father.