Surveillance 2.0: How personality qualifies reactions to social media monitoring policies

•The Big Five traits moderate how people react to social media surveillance.•Agreeableness and openness qualify the effects of justifications for monitoring.•Justifications do not affect people with low agreeableness or high openness.•Invasiveness mediates the effect of justifications on fairness perceptions.

Recently, employers in the U.S. have started to implement and justify social media monitoring policies as a means of safeguarding their organization's reputation. What individual differences explain how people respond to these policies? In this study, we examine how the Big Five personality traits moderate the effects of presenting a justification for social media monitoring on feelings of invasiveness and unfairness. Findings from an experiment conducted with 195 participants suggest that the presence of a justification for monitoring lowered perceptions of invasiveness, and invasiveness fully mediated the effect of presenting a justification on fairness perceptions. However, these findings were dependent on agreeableness and openness; people with high agreeableness and low openness were easily placated with justifications for social media monitoring, whereas people with low agreeableness and high openness were not moved by justifications. These results demonstrate the importance of individual differences to understanding when people will resist or accept organizational efforts to pry into their online activities.