Experiencing Digital Sovereignty: Exploring Associations Among Perceived Personal Data Controllability, Trust, and Anxiety in Social Media

Social media platforms collect, process, and monetise personal data on a scale that has made control over personal information a central concern for users and regulators. Research on digital sovereignty has largely addressed this concern at the level of states and institutions, leaving the individual user’s experience of control comparatively unexamined. This study examines how perceived personal data controllability, an affordance of platform interfaces, is associated with control-based privacy beliefs, trust in the platform, and anxiety. A scenario-based survey was conducted with 308 Saudi participants, who evaluated a simulated social networking platform designed to emphasise privacy and user control. Digital sovereignty was conceptualised as users’ claim to self-determination over their data on platforms, with control-based privacy beliefs as one psychological expression of this claim. Stronger perceived controllability was positively associated with control-based privacy beliefs and trust and negatively associated with anxiety. Control-based privacy beliefs moderated the association between controllability and anxiety, which was stronger among participants who held these beliefs less strongly, but did not moderate the association with trust. Control-based privacy beliefs thus function as a boundary condition for users’ affective—but not evaluative—responses to platform design.