"From my Facebook profile": What do nursing students share on Timeline, Photos, Friends, and About sections?

Social media is a platform where knowledge, experience, and thoughts are shared by society. Like many different users, nursing students also take part in this platform. While some researchers are evaluating social media as a new tool for training nursing students and patients, others are drawing attention to the legal, ethical, and moral problems of non-professional and inappropriate content sharing on social media. Since both sides maybe rightful in different aspects, this study was planned to understand why nursing students usually use Facebook which is one of the most popular tools.

The study aimed to define what nursing students are sharing through their Facebook accounts, whom they are befriending with, whether they use privacy settings and/or regret their shared posts.

Content of nursing students' Facebook posts were examined in this cross-sectional, descriptive study. The study was conducted with 100 nursing students in a nursing faculty. Each student analysed their own Facebook account retrospectively and recorded their posts on the Facebook Review Criteria Form which was developed by the researchers.

Overall, it was found that 40% of the students "sometimes" hesitated before sharing information on Facebook due to safety concerns. Moreover, 51% of the students "rarely" regretted their Facebook posts. Students were using Facebook mostly for check-in (44%), and a smaller portion of them were sharing information related to health (27%). They mostly shared information and photos about themselves and did not share any photos related to patients and patient relatives.

Nursing students were found to be cautious about their Facebook posts. To maintain and develop students' cautiousness, their awareness should be increased about this issue during their professional education.