Why do people have and actively engage with social media? From a pragmatic standpoint, the reason most, if not all, people engage with social media is because members of their in-person network use it. This is commonly referred to as the network effect whereby the utility of a social platform is corelated to the amount of people actively using that platform. The more people who use a social media platform the greater the utility. Digging deeper, once a user is onboarded onto a platform, why then do they continue to actively engage with the platform? In a qualitative interview-based study of people between the ages of 18 to 56 who actively use social media, the most common uses for social media were social interaction (88%) and information seeking (80%). Only 56% of people said they use social media to express their opinions. This finding is supported by 2020 Twitter user statistics where 44% of its accounts had never posted any content. There seems to be a disconnect, whereby the intention of social interaction with others doesn’t materialize in the form of expressing oneself to others. This blog has thus far examined the ways in which people interact in society through the use of free speech. For an era saturated with content distribution channels, many of us appear to remain silent.
The purpose of this paper is to examine the ways in which people currently engage with social media and the reasoning behind why or why not people express their ideas as publicly accessible content. This paper will examine qualitative and quantitative studies on social media usage to help understand how these platforms keep users actively engaged. Using that same data, this paper will then determine why a high level of active social media engagement is coupled with lower levels of content posting. People are currently less inclined to post relative to their active engagement on social media platforms because while there is a gratifying emotional response when others interact with your content, social media platforms actively prioritize content consumption over production, current content curation algorithms reduce or eliminate the intended impact of content, and fear of social pushback makes people less inclined to post online.
A key misconception people generally have is that social media is a public service. Not in the same way roads and fire departments are, but rather in the way that search engines like Google are considered ‘free aspects’ of the world we live in. Just because it’s free to use doesn’t mean you aren’t paying for a service. While money is not being directly exchanged between consumer and business, users are paying with their time and data. This is an important premise to establish because it helps demonstrate the fact that social media is not, at its core, designed to enhance the human experience by increasing connectivity. It’s a powerful tool designed to generate profits by optimizing user engagement to increase advertisement impressions.
One reason people interact with social media is because it gives users the ability to express themselves to anyone in the world. While this is theoretically true, for most people, their reach is limited to their respective networks. A study conducted by Toubia et al that was later published by The Marketing Science Journal wanted to test if increasing a user’s follower base had any effect on their posting frequency on Twitter. The intrinsic utility, as defined by this study, is that Twitter offers you free access to all users. This utility increases once the content a user creates reaches a larger proportion of that userbase. This leads to image-related utility, which is “the sense of self-worth and social acceptance provided by a user’s activities on the platform.” The study found that “the majority of noncommercial users go through two phases, where intrinsic utility from posting is larger than image-related utility when they have fewer followers, but image-related utility becomes larger than intrinsic utility as they amass more followers.” By creating an environment where users consistently gain more followers, social media platforms incentivize users to post more content. These companies currently use graph neural networks to optimize friend recommendations in order to facilitate the growth of a user’s following. The problem is that social media companies realize that having users post content is not the most efficient way of keeping them engaged.
One framework through which to examine social media engagement is the Uses and Gratifications Theoretical Approach (U>). The basic premise on which this theory is built is that people who consume media seek gratification. According to Kircaburn et al, “gratifications sought refer to users’ expectations of the types of gratifications they would get from using media, whereas gratifications obtained refers to the needs satisfied by media use.” What this study did was examine the ways in which social media satiated peoples’ expected and desired level of gratification. For this experiment, 1008 students between the ages of 17 and 32 were tested in Turkey. Using a Social Media Use Questionnaire (SMUQ) system, the study isolated traits related to user gratification in order to determine what aspects of social media lead to increased levels of ‘problematic social media use.’ The study concluded that women in the study who used social media to maintain relationships and consume educational (general learning, not necessarily about school) content and men who used it as a way to meet new people were more likely to have higher levels PSMU. These gratification inducing behaviors are a product of the core functionalities that exist on social media platforms today. Adding friends, finding new people, and searching for relevant content have one thing in common: they don’t involve posting new content publicly. With the click of a button or the scroll of a feed, these actions can all be accomplished with little to no need for critical thinking.
From a business perspective, having users with problematic levels of social media use (4+ hours daily as defined by the study) is highly profitable. What these companies have created are platforms that are designed to retain eyeballs. The Facebook Papers leaked by former employee turned whistle-blower Francis Haugen proved that the company was aware of the negative side-effects of their services. That’s not to say that the downsides of social media addiction weren’t already known to the public. While the public may not know exactly how the content curation algorithms on which these social media platforms are built work, they can see how it’s clearly designed to keep users actively engaged.
For users of social media who actively post, this same curation algorithm can lead to content having suboptimal or unintended impacts. A study conducted by Etter et al argues that social media creates “a distorted view of activism realities, since hidden algorithms are responsible for the circulation of content that forms the basis of collective action.” Central to this argument is the concept of affordance, which is the relationship between users of technology and how that technology leads to their organizational goals. The problem identified is that there is a separation between an activist’s goal of enacting social change and the social media companies’ goal of increasing user engagement. Content curation algorithms consistently push posts almost exclusively to people who would most likely agree with its ideas, creating echo chambers of extremism rather than productive debate. While this may create traction on social media, a consistent byproduct of content curation has been increased levels of polarization. In most cases this is antithetical to the agendas of activists who use social media to promote their organizations and the causes they support. In addition, content recommendation algorithms on platforms such as Facebook can inadvertently fill follower feeds with nearly identical and potentially contradictory information. This creates an ‘information overload’ that reduces collective action. For example, the Omega women’s activism group from Tunisia publicized their sit-in protest against a law that would restrict the clothing women could wear. The social media manager of the organization was shocked by the low attendance. She later found out that many of those who intended on participating “got multiple contradicting notifications about where the protest would take place.” So, in addition to promoting echo chambers of like-minded ideas, these algorithms are flawed because they promote large quantities of homogenous content that can confuse users, alienating them from the causes they intended on supporting. It is important to note that as far as we know, this is because of the limitations of current machine learning algorithms, not because Facebook intended on decreasing in-person user engagement. While Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms have been accused of use their algorithms to push content that aligns with their social and political views, this is currently unsubstantiated.
A factor separate from the operations of social media platforms that limits user posting is fear of expressing one’s opinion. The Journal of Media Psychology published a study involving 404 Iranian university students that attempted to quantify their social media posting anxiety. An interesting, but admittedly obvious, conclusion from this study was that “the participants experienced more anxiety when they posted with their real identities (77.2%) in comparison [to] anonymous posting (22.8%).” This boils down to the fact that people are conscious of how the ideas they make public will be evaluated by others and fear potentially negative backlash. The problem is that there is no system on social media platforms to protect individuals who post mildly controversial content from a barrage of hate messages. Comment and share functionalities make attacking someone’s opinion very easy. Ziegele et al conducted a study where people’s level of donations to the Syrian Refugee Crisis in Europe was measured relative to the tone of comments on non-profit social media postings. The experiment contained dummy comments that were neutral with a single test comment that was either neutral, negative-civil, or hateful. The study concluded that donations quantities decreased when just one of the comments was negative-civil, and even more when it was hateful. Even just one negative comment has the potential to drastically reduce the level of positive interaction with a post.
In conclusion, posting content on social media is a relatively small part of user engagement because while users are emotionally conditioned to experience gratification when people interact with their ideas, content consumption is the most efficient form of user engagement, curation algorithms lower content impact, and people have anxiety about making their opinions public. It’s increasingly unclear how to establish best practices when it comes to engaging with social media. What made platforms like Facebook and Twitter so revolutionary when they were first introduced was that they allowed for users to engage with anyone in the world instantly. Via the network effect, the value of engagement grew rapidly as more people adopted these services. I think that it is becoming increasingly apparent that people are becoming increasingly addicted to or alienated from current social medias. Addressing the latter, users are moving to more private channels to express their ideas. This has a larger polarizing effect which in many cases results in violence. The Wall Street Journal reported on leaked reports from the Facebook Papers that revealed the company was aware that their private groups functionality led to anti-Muslim hate that culminated in the death of 53 in Delhi, India.
Social media is a completely unnatural form of human interaction that has become normalized over the past decade. People have never in history been exposed to such instant idea sharing. People engage with social media because it is highly addictive by design. When the goal is to increase consumptions, platforms fail to incentivize activities that cause user friction (breaks in the continuity of engagement) such as the critical thinking required to post insightful content. In addition, people have become less receptive to ideas that challenge their belief system because of the infrequency with which it is presented to them. Instead of conducting civil debate, the response is to further engrain one’s existing belief system by interacting exclusively with those who share it.
Current social media is unconducive to free speech. The problem is that the model of incentivizing consumption of content users are most likely to agree and engage with means that anything that challenges their viewpoint is seen as a direct threat to their belief system. Social media needs to be engaging or else no one would use it, but it also has to encourage socially productive behavior. I personally believe it should be incumbent upon the next generation of entrepreneurs to build platforms that encourage balance between these two factors. Existing social media platforms have demonstrated their incapacity to properly address this issue. By no means is this an easy problem to solve. A solution to this could be to make a paid model for social media, removing engagement-based incentives. Instead of thinking of social media as a free bulletin for content, it could be a service like your cellphone plan, which has a dollarized intrinsic value. Maybe then collective interaction will be taken more seriously. This idea is clearly not perfect in that people may be less inclined to join a paid service when they have access to free social media, but assuming key functionalities like content curation are updated, there could be an immense value add to joining. The benefit of increased connectivity from social media should be that it facilitates the spread of ideas and the growth of collective human knowledge. It is clear that current social media platforms need to be systematically amended or replaced in order for this to occur.
Work Cited
Etter M, Albu OB. Activists in the dark: Social media algorithms and collective action in two social movement organizations. Organization (London, England). 2021;28(1):68-91. doi:10.1177/1350508420961532
Kircaburun K, Alhabash S, Tosuntaş ŞB, Griffiths MD. Uses and Gratifications of Problematic Social Media Use Among University Students: a Simultaneous Examination of the Big Five of Personality Traits, Social Media Platforms, and Social Media Use Motives. International journal of mental health and addiction. 2020;18(3):525-547. doi:10.1007/s11469-018-9940-6
Liu Z, Zhou J. Introduction to Graph Neural Networks . Morgan & Claypool; 2020. doi:10.2200/S00980ED1V01Y202001AIM045
Purnell, Newley, and Jeff Horwitz. “Facebook Services Are Used to Spread Religious Hatred in India, Internal Documents Show.” The Wall Street Journal, Dow Jones & Company, 23 Oct. 2021, https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-services-are-used-to-spread-religious-hatred-in-india-internal-documents-show-11635016354?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=1.
Shabahang R, Aruguete MS, Shim H. Social Media Posting Anxiety: Interpersonal Trust, Fear of Negative Evaluation, and Hurt Feeling Proneness as Predictors. Journal of media psychology. Published online 2021. doi:10.1027/1864-1105/a000300
Toubia O, Stephen AT. Intrinsic vs. Image-Related Utility in Social Media: Why Do People Contribute Content to Twitter? Marketing science (Providence, RI). 2013;32(3):368-392. doi:10.1287/mksc.2013.0773
Twitter by the Numbers: Stats, Demographics & Fun Facts. https://www.omnicoreagency.com/twitter-statistics/.
Whiting A, Williams D. Why people use social media: a uses and gratifications approach. Qualitative market research. 2013;16(4):362-369. doi:10.1108/QMR-06-2013-0041
Ziegele M, Koehler C, Weber M. Socially Destructive? Effects of Negative and Hateful User Comments on Readers’ Donation Behavior toward Refugees and Homeless Persons. Journal of broadcasting & electronic media. 2018;62(4):636-653. doi:10.1080/08838151.2018.1532430