A large body of research has considered the positive aspects of social media. However, emerging research and practice are beginning to focus on complex and often alarming ways in which use of social media may harmfully affect individuals, organizations and societies. For example, data leakage prevention and suspicious networks detection (Perez et al., 2012; Perez et al., 2013), negative word-of-mouth dynamics (Pfeffer et al., 2014) and their repercussions on marketing and e-reputation (Castellano et al. 2014; 2016), privacy violation (Fox and Moreland, 2015; Krasnova et al., 2012), anxiety and depression (Krasnova et al., 2015) addiction (Andreassen et al., 2012; Turel, 2015; Turel & Serenko, 2011), misrepresentation and negative psychological consequences (Garcia & Sikström, 2014; Mäntymäki & Islam, 2016) are some of the issues that have been studied so far. Many others require a deepened interest, especially within the organizational settings, in which social media pervasive usage might contribute to jeopardize systems security (Sokolova et al., 2016), disrupt work habits and impoverish individual performance via information overload, technostress and fatigue (Kefi et al., 2015; Kefi et al., 2016; Maier et al., 2015). Larger effects include enabling racism, terrorism and cyber-crime (Dean et al., 2012).

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Dark Side of Social Media - Interviews