  This research aims to investigate the impact of users' privacy awareness on
their self-disclosing behavior. Our primary research question is to investigate
how young social media users feel about the benefits and risks of disclosing
them-selves on social media and how risk-benefit awareness influences the
assess-ment of their self-disclosure. Based on the data we recorded, the factor
analysis, and three-way ANOVA, we conclude that users who know more about
privacy benefits share more on social media (F= 36.291; df 1; sig < .001) while
those who know less about the benefits disclose less on social media. According
to the analysis, users who know more about self-disclosure risks share less on
so-cial media (F= 7.001; df 1; sig < .001). Users disclose less information on
so-cial media platforms based on the different levels of their risk perceptions
(df 3, F=.715, sig < 0.5). This indicates that risks on social media platforms
vary to some degree. We saw that people's sharing habits based on their levels
of risk, benefits, and social media platforms can vary. One thing that remained
certain was users' main benefit for engaging and disclosing on social media is
their need to stay in touch with friends and their need for community. On the
flip side, the main risk was the need not to be impersonated and misunderstood
by people. Based on a simple frequency analysis of the open-ended questions we
asked In our data collection, the most highlighted words in our responses were
"people" and "friends". These were the two main words that stood out in all the
data we collected concerning the benefits, risks, and intention to
self-disclose.
