Research and practice have mostly focused on the “bright side” of social media, aiming to understand and help in leveraging the manifold opportunities afforded by this technology. However, it is increasingly observable that social media present enormous risks for individuals, communities, firms, and even the whole of society. Examples for this “dark side” of social media include cyberbullying, addictive use, trolling, online witch hunts, fake news, and privacy abuse. In this article, we aim to illustrate the multidimensionality of the dark side of social media and describe the related various undesirable outcomes. To do this, we adapt the established social media honeycomb framework to explain the dark side implications of each of the seven functional building blocks: conversations, sharing, presence, relationships, reputation, groups, and identity. On the basis of these reflections, we present a number of avenues for future research, so as to facilitate a better understanding and use of social media.

1. Social media? It’s serious!
Understanding the dark
side of social media
In the:
European Management Journal,
Vol 36, Issue 4, pages 431-438, 2018

2. The authors
Christian V. Baccarella Timm F. Wagner Jan H. Kietzmann Ian P. McCarthy

3. The paper
● Click here to access the paper

4. The bright side of social media
● Individuals, communities, and organizations create, share,
and consume information from each other.
● Firms use social media to:
○ improve marketing, public relations, customer service,
product development and personnel decision-making, so
as to analyze:
■ user-generated content (Paniagua, Korzynski, & Mas-
Tur, 2017).
■ consumer-generated intellectual property (Berthon,
Pitt, Kietzmann, & McCarthy, 2015).
■ interactions on social networking sites (Wagner,
Baccarella, & Voigt, 2017).

5. The bright side of social media
Social media functionality (Kietzmann et al., 2011).

6. The dark side of social media
● Trolling and online stalking
● Sharing faux-pas
● Shaming and cyberbullying
● Online witch hunts
● Addictive use and “fear of missing out” (FOMO)
● Privacy abuse
● Fake news
● Fake profiles and bots

7. Chamath Palihapitiya,
a former Facebook
executive, stated that
he regrets that some
of the tools he has
helped to create “are
ripping apart the
social fabric of how
society works”

8. The dark side of social media
● While we use social media to connect to our far-
away friends, at the same time, we disconnect
from those who sit across the table from us.
● Social media leads to “shallowing” where
certain types of social media activity (e.g.,
sharing and conversing) lead to a decline in
ordinary daily reflective thinking, and instead
promote quick and superficial thoughts, that
can result in cognitive and moral triviality.

9. The dark side of social media

10. Conversations
● The extent to which users use social
media to inappropriately communicate
with others.
● In 2010, a Reddit user who had donated a
kidney made a posting seeking donations
to a related charity. Reddit users thought
this was a scam and contacted the user at
his home with death threats.
● In 2013, Reddit’s platform helped to fuel
"online witch hunts" when groups of
users had wrongly named several people
as suspects in the Boston bombing.

11. Conversations
● Chatbots and social bots that mimic
human behavior to pollute conversations
in online spaces with spam and
misleading advertisements.
● The contributing editor of Scientific
American Mind and former editor in chief
of Psychology Today was fooled into
thinking a chatbot on a dating service was
interested in him romantically.
● When Microsoft released its Tay chatbot
in 2016 to engage with millennials, some
users tricked the chatbot into learning
how to make racist statements.

12. Sharing
● The extent to which consumers exchange,
distribute, and receive content, that is
inappropriate.
● Fake news headlines for the 2016 U.S.
presidential election include:
○ "Pope Francis Shocks World, Endorses
Donald Trump for President"
○ "FBI Agent Suspected in Hillary Email
Leaks Found Dead in Apparent Murder-
Suicide"
● These headlines and their fake stories were
on more than 100 websites run by teenagers
in the small town of Veles, Macedonia.

13. Sharing
● Intellectual property infringement risks of
sharing:
○ In 2007 Stephanie Lenz posted a 29-
second video on YouTube of her baby
pushing a toy around the kitchen, while
dancing to the song “Let’s Go Crazy” by
Prince.
○ Universal Music Group which manages
the copyright of Prince’s music, decided
that the song rather than the dancing
baby was the focal content in the video.
Universal issued a takedown notice.

14. Presence
● The extent to which users inappropriately
know whether, where and when, others
are accessible.
● From 2011 to 2015, the default settings
for Facebook Messenger were to collect
and display geolocation information with
message content.
● In 2012, a number of organizations
reported privacy concerns about the
implication of this geolocation sharing
feature of the Messenger application, but
to no avail. The policy was not changed.

15. Presence
● In 2015, an extension for the Chrome
browser named Marauders Map (after the
magical map in the Harry Potter books)
allowed Facebook Messenger users to
access and map location data, and thus
stalk, the identity and movements of all
individuals in a conversation.

16. Relationships
● The extent to which users can
inappropriately relate to other users.
● This includes cyberbullying and online
harassment:
○ Estimates are that 10 – 40% of the
youth are victims of cyberbullying.
○ 40% of those who cyberbully report
they do so for fun, possibly connected
with occurrences of jealousy.

17. Relationships
● The dark side of social media
relationships also includes online
stalking, where social media are used
to threaten, coerce or harass an
individual, group, or organization.
● The harassment includes false
accusations and defamation, covert
and overt monitoring and gathering
information.

18. Reputation
● The degree to which users can
inappropriately identify and influence
the standing of themselves and others.
● Numerous business and political leaders,
and others, have been forced to resign
after posting offensive, disingenuous, or
ridiculous content on social media.
● During hiring, employers are increasingly
reviewing applicants' profiles on social
media.
● Most adults searched for information
about someone they seek to engage with
in professional or romantic capacities.

19. Reputation
● Blogs such as Gawker and Wonkette
have helped to destroy the reputations
of many public figures.
● Hollaback!, Don’t Date Him Girl, and
“revenge porn” sites provide platforms
for users to shame, hurt, or reprimand
others.
● Users hurt the reputations without
thinking; often because they were highly
emotional when posting, or were under
the influence of drugs or alcohol.

20. Groups
● The degree to which users
inappropriately create, join or are
excluded from groups.
● Users overly define themselves in terms
of social groupings (ingroup identity).
● Groups become “echo-chambers” in
which users’ beliefs are amplified and
reinforced, and those who do not fit into
those groups (outgroups) are belittled.

21. Groups
● “ingroup love” = users in the group are
motivated to serve, help and maintain
the in-group.
● “out-group hate” users not in the group
are the target of aggressive, hurtful or
competitive actions.
● Interests, gender and race often define
the polarized discussions groups.

22. Identity
● The extent to which users have their
online identities inappropriately
exploited.
● The other blocks of the dark side
honeycomb (e.g., conversations,
relationships, groups, sharing, etc.) work
to negatively impact who we are and our
personality and character.
● Social media uses exhibitions status
updates, photos, comments, chats and
blogs, to reveal personal, temporal,
locational and situational information.

23. Identity
● The visibility, transparency, permanence,
and granularity of social media activity,
means that users can easily lose control
of their own identity.
● To adapt the famous quote from
Shakespeare’s, As You Like It:
“All the world’s social media is a stage.
And all the users are merely being played
and distracted. They post and consume and
their identities. And each, in their time plays
many parts in this online play.”

24. Contrasting the dark functionalities
of trolling and fake news

25. Don’t be afraid of the dark: a call to
action for social media researchers
● The dark side honeycomb serves as a
useful foundation for research to take “a
walk on the dark side” and work to:
○ Build dark side-orientated social
media theories, models, and
classification frameworks!
○ Use adequate methodologies for
online and dark contexts!
○ Collect data and build cases!
HEY SCHOLAR,
TAKE A WALK ON
THE DARK SIDE

26. References
Baccarella C.V., Wagner T.F., Kietzmann J.H., and McCarthy I.P. (2018). Social
media? It’s serious! Understanding the dark side of social media. European
Management Journal. 36(4): 431-438
Berthon, P., Pitt, L., Kietzmann, J., & McCarthy, I. P. (2015). CGIP: managing
consumer-generated intellectual property. California Management Review,
57(4), 43–62.
Kietzmann, J. H., Hermkens, K., McCarthy, I. P., & Silvestre, B. S. (2011). Social
media? Get serious! Understanding the functional building blocks of social
media. Business Horizons, 54(3), 241–251.
Paniagua, J., Korzynski, P., & Mas-Tur, A. (2017). Crossing borders with social
media: Online social networks and FDI. European Management Journal, 35(3),
314–326.
Wagner, T. F., Baccarella, C. V., & Voigt, K.-I. (2017). Framing social media
communication: Investigating the effects of brand post appeals on user
interaction. European Management Journal, 35(5), 606–616.

27. Dr. Ian
McCarthy
@toffeemen
68
Professor, Technology and
Operations Management
Beedie School of Business
Simon Fraser University
Ian McCarthy
It Depends
Blog
Slides produced by: