BİBLIOMETRIC ANALYSIS OF SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH ON SOCIAL MEDIA AND PRIVACY

Abstract

Considered a fundamental human right in modern societies, privacy is the right of individuals, groups, and institutions to define when, how, and to what extent information about themselves will be shared by others. However, as digitalization and Web 2.0 technologies have advanced, the ubiquity of social media at the center of daily life has increasingly blurred the boundaries of privacy. This context has laid the groundwork for numerous studies to analyze the relationship between social media and privacy, encompassing a wide range of topics, including surveillance, privacy violations, sharenting, artificial intelligence, and the blurring of the private-public spheres. This study aimed to analyze research articles published in leading journals on privacy and social media using bibliometric methods. Accordingly, the study analyzed data from 505 articles available in the Web of Science database, only the communication category, using visual network maps generated by the VOSviewer software program. The findings revealed that the United States produced the most publications in this discipline, and the University of Illinois in the United States had the highest number of publications. Additionally, "privacy," "social media," and "Facebook" were the most commonly used keywords in privacy and social media studies, and "Social Media + Society," "New Media & Society," and "Information, Communication & Society" were the journals that published the most articles in this discipline. Finally, Sabine Trepte was the researcher who scrutinized the relationship between privacy and social media most frequently, with eight articles and 319 citations.