“Is it a good idea to post this on Facebook?” it’s a thought more people than you think have just before posting something on Facebook. Or having second thoughts right after posting something on your or somebody else’s wall, less uncommon than you might think. Carnegie Mellon PhD student Sauvik Das and Facebook’s Adam Kramer measured how many people typed more than five characters into Facebook content-input boxes, but than did not post them.

What I found interesting in this research is the idea that ‘the perceived audience’ plays an important role:

• posts are censored more frequently than comments,
• status updates and posts directed at groups are censored most frequently of all sharing use cases investigated in this research.

I found this research through a post on Mashable and they cite earlier research with a small group of users that found five reasons people chose not to share what they’d written (something that wasn’t part of this research):

• aversion to sparking an argument or other discussion,
• concern their post would offend or hurt someone,
• felt their post was boring or repetitive,
• decided the content undermined their desired self-presentation
• or were just unable to post due to a technological or other constraint.

Abstract of the research that can be read freely here:

We report results from an exploratory analysis examining “last-minute” self-censorship, or content that is filtered after being written, on Facebook. We collected data from 3.9 million users over 17 days and associate self-censorship behavior with features describing users, their social graph, and the interactions between them. Our results indicate that 71% of users exhibited some level of last-minute self-censorship in the time period, and provide specific evidence supporting the theory that a user’s “perceived audience” lies at the heart of the issue: posts are censored more frequently than comments, with status updates and posts directed at groups censored most frequently of all sharing use cases investigated. Furthermore, we find that: people with more boundaries to regulate censor more; males censor more posts than females and censor even more posts with mostly male friends than do females, but censor no more comments than females; people who exercise more control over their audience censor more content; and, users with more politically and age diverse friends censor less, in general.