Toward a Feminist Social Media Vulnerability Taxonomy

Vulnerability intimately shapes the lived human experience and continues to gain attention in computer-supported cooperative work and human-computer interaction scholarship broadly, and in social media studies specifically. Social media comprise sociotechnical affordances that may uniquely shape lived experiences with vulnerability, rendering existing frameworks inadequate for comprehensive examinations of vulnerability as mediated on social media. Through interviews with social media users in the United States (N = 20) and drawing on feminist conceptualizations of vulnerability and social media disclosure and privacy scholarship, we propose a feminist taxonomy of social media vulnerability (FSMV). The FSMV taxonomy reflects vulnerability sources, states, and valences, within which we introduce the state of networked vulnerability and ambivalent, desired, and undesired valences. We describe how social media enable forms of vulnerability different from in-person settings, challenge framings that synonymize vulnerability with risk/harm, and facilitate interdisciplinary theory-building. Additionally, we discuss how networked, ambivalent, and un/desired vulnerability extend and diverge from prior work to create a theoretically rich taxonomy that is useful for future work on social media and vulnerability. Finally, we discuss implications for design related to granular control over profile, content, and privacy settings, as well as implications for platform accountability, as they pertain to social media vulnerability.