Understanding Social Media Users' Perspectives for Content Reuse

Social media users create immense value for various technologies such as search engines, content platforms, and most recently, generative AI models. Among social media users, those who produce content professionally, such as artists and creative workers, have expressed strong concerns about unauthorized reuse of their content; however, it remains unclear how the vast majority of casual users perceive content reuse, in particular for AI training. To gain a comprehensive understanding of users' perspectives, we surveyed 478 Instagram users from a university network about how much they value their content for commercial reuse and their acceptance of specific content reuse scenarios. We found that under reverse auction, in which the lowest bidder wins, respondents' evaluation of their content for commercial reuse is highly skewed, with a median of $62 and a long tail of more than thousands of dollars. A nontrivial percentage of respondents found content reuse for search engine display, education, and academic research acceptable. Conversely, content reuse for commercial or non-profit generative AI models was a negotiable scenario for most respondents. Most notably, compensation was likely to make almost all scenarios more acceptable to users. Our work highlights the diverse, contextually dependent perspectives that users have. We discuss how design, policy, and market practices might support contextually aware content reuse.