Athens Journal of Mass Media and Communications Volume 8, Issue 3, July 2022 – Pages 179-200 https://doi.org/10.30958/ajmmc.8-3-3 doi=10.30958/ajmmc.8-3-3 A Development, Validity and Reliability of Safe Social Networking Scale By Nilgun Tosun * & Aynur Gecer ± Social networks has become in the spotlight for millions of people since they create a dynamic and rich interaction environment between users, and allow free access and usage of fake identity information. Distance education and working from home around the world due to COVID-19 pandemic has affected the increase in the rate and duration of social media usage in the last year. Unfortunately, this increase has offered criminals, who have the potential to pose risks and dangers on social media, more opportunities. Therefore, it has become even more important to use social media as a safe environment. The objective of this study was to develop a Safe Social Networking Scale for determining the security levels in social network usage. The validity and reliability studies of the scale were conducted with 585 social media users. As a result of the validity study, 28 items under five factors were obtained. These factors were being “Time Tunnel/Wall Sharing”, “Safety of Social Network Profile Information and Sharing”, “Social Network Friends List and its Safety”, “Safety of Social Network Information Input”, “Safe Login to Social Network Account”. The items obtained were capable of discriminating the individuals in terms of the features to be measured by the scale. There has not been any scale that directly determines the level of safe use of social media in the literature. The developed scale is expected to fill this scale gap in the literature. Keywords: safety, social networks, scale development, reliability, validity Introduction Social networks are one of the applications introduced into the lives of people following the development of web 2.0 technologies. In addition to read shares, the social networks allow users many opportunities, such as to comment on what they read, to produce contents in different formats and to share these, to like, to play a game. The opportunities provided by the social networks make them attractive for users. In addition to this attractiveness, the number of social network users is increasing day by day due to the fact that the social networks are free, it is not necessary to become a member with real identity information, it is possible to access the social networks anywhere and anytime by a device with an internet connection. The studies conducted corroborate this idea. While 53% of the world‟s population were active social media users in October 2020 (Kemp, 2020), this figure increased by 13.2% compared to the same month of the previous year and * Associate Professor, Department of Computer and Instructional Technology Education, Trakya University, Turkey. ± Professor, Department of Computer and Instructional Technology Education, Kocaeli University, Turkey.