The intention of this article was to illustrate the seven building blocks of the dark side of social media, in great part to motivate further research that tries to untangle the underlying mechanisms in new ways. Existing theories cannot necessarily be transferred to the social media sphere (Naylor, Lamberton, & West, 2012). New theories, or combinations of existing theories, might better suit the inherent characteristics of social media, akin for example, to Scheiner, Krämer, and Baccarella (2016) who base their theoretical framework to explain unethical behavior on social media by entrepreneurs on the concept of moral disengagement and regulatory focus theory. We believe that our dark side honeycomb framework can help to motivate and guide the combination of lenses from different disciplines in order to develop novel theories, models, and classification frameworks that shed light on the dark side of social media.4.2. Use adequate methodologies for online and dark contexts!There is a significant opportunity for future research studies using contemporary methodologies that suit the characteristics of social media. For instance, a recent and effective development for understanding online behavior might be netnography (a portmanteau of Internet and ethnography), which allows researchers to study social interaction in modern digital communication contexts. However, a lot has happened since its introduction by Kozinets in 1998: smart phones with high-definition cameras, ubiquitous data networks, and social media networks that did not exist at all. The activities in the sharing building block of the dark side honeycomb, for instance, certainly were not the same before the widespread adoption of these tools, and neither were likely any of the other building blocks. These technological developments and their pervasiveness in our society certainly warrant the advancement of digital data collection and analysis methodologies. Especially in light of recent advancements (e.g., artificial intelligence-powered social media content analysis tools included in IBM Watson), we hope that fellow researchers will develop and test new ways in which we can study the dark side of social media.

the more outrageous the posting, the quicker it tends to spread and harm reputations.

The dark side of this functionality is that the location and availability of users are known and can be tracked without their awareness or consent.

we suggest that each functional block of the framework can also be used to help to understand and examine different aspects of the dark side of social media.

The “shallowing hypothesis,” for instance, suggests that certain types of social media activity (e.g., sharing and conversing) lead to a decline in ordinary daily reflective thinking and instead promote quick and superficial thoughts that can result in cognitive and moral triviality.

social media are not good or bad, helpful or unhelpful, black or white, and bright or dark.

For example, there have been an increasing number of reports and research attention into concerns such as cyberbullying (O'Keeffe & Clarke-Pearson, 2011), trolling (Buckels, Trapnell, & Paulhus, 2014; Hardaker, 2010), privacy invasions (Pai & Arnott, 2013), fake news (Allcott & Gentzkow, 2017; European Commission, 2018), online firestorms (Pfeffer, Zorbach, & Carley, 2014), and addictive use (Blackwell, Leaman, Tramposch, Osborne, & Liss, 2017).

Many studies have touted the advantages that social media would bring to individuals and firms (e.g., Kumar, Bezawada, Rishika, Janakiraman, & Kannan, 2016; Sabate, Berbegal-Mirabent, Cañabate, & Lebherz, 2014; Wagner, 2017). They highlight the “bright side of social media” and how engagement between firms and consumers is being democratized (Kietzmann, Hermkens, McCarthy, & Silvestre, 2011). For firms, this means social media would improve marketing, public relations, customer service, product development, personnel decision-making, and other business activities that rely on information exchanges and engagement with consumers and employees. Many of these advantages have materialized, thus leading almost 50% of all EU firms to use at least one form of social media in 2017 (Eurostat, 2017b). These firms use social media to not only broadcast company content but also track sentiment worldwide by analyzing user-generated content (Paniagua, Korzynski, & Mas-Tur, 2017), consumer-generated intellectual property (Berthon, Pitt, Kietzmann, & McCarthy, 2015), and interactions on social networking sites (Wagner, Baccarella, & Voigt, 2017), to adjust their business and marketing strategies appropriately.Regardless of the numerous opportunities social media offer, an increasing number of incidents demonstrate that there is undoubtedly a “dark side” to social media.