Many studies examining social media use rely on self-report survey questions about how much time participants spend on social media platforms. Because they are challenging to answer accurately and susceptible to various biases, these self-reported measures are known to contain error -- although the specific contours of this error are not well understood. This paper compares data from ten self-reported Facebook use survey measures deployed in 15 countries (N = 49,934) against data from Facebook's server logs to describe factors associated with error in commonly used survey items from the literature. Self-reports were moderately correlated with actual Facebook use (r = 0.42 for the best-performing question), though participants significantly overestimated how much time they spent on Facebook and underestimated the number of times they visited. People who spent a lot of time on the platform were more likely to misreport their time, as were teens and younger adults, which is notable because of the high reliance on college-aged samples in many fields. We conclude with recommendations on the most accurate ways to collect time-spent data via surveys.
Print news agencies have been under pressure from falling sales and advertising revenue and increased competition. As the Internet became the dominant medium, news agencies invested heavily in their websites and apps, providing their news for free, rather than selling a print edition. Reducing the cost of production and removing access barriers such as geographic location had the potential to increase readership and advertising, covering costs and maintaining profits. Unfortunately, this business model has for the most part failed. Many higher quality news agencies are now implementing paywalls on their news websites to once again monetize their product. Others have begun to emulate the look and feel of tabloid news websites to increase readership and stickiness and advertising revenue. This study shows the negative impact of such visual tabloidization on initial impressions of credibility, which may have long term detrimental effects on the news agency.<br>The authors would like to dedicate this paper to the memory of Professor Séamus "Shay" Lawless, the supervisor of this work who died on May 16th 2019 after fulfilling his dream of summiting Mount Everest.
Most social media platforms record, display, and archive users' personal histories. This persistence of posts over time can be problematic, as users' self-presentation goals and network composition change, but old content remains. In this paper, we explore an alternative feature that provides control over content persistence. We present findings from interviews with 16 users of the popular Chinese social media platform WeChat Moments. We focused on Moments' Time Limit setting, which makes social media data ephemeral to audiences, but persistent to posters. Interviewees described changes in their self-presentation goals and social network composition over time and reported the Time Limit feature helped them effortlessly manage their desired self-presentation as they matured. Drawing on these findings, we discuss design implications for social media to facilitate greater control over content visibility and persistence, which may have significant benefits for social media users with large and diverse networks.
We present a mixed-methods study of viewers on their practices and motivations around watching mukbang video streams of people eating large quantities of food. Viewers' experiences provide insight on future technologies for multisensorial video streams and technology-supported commensality (eating with others). We surveyed 104 viewers and interviewed 15 of them about their attitudes and reflections on their mukbang viewing habits, their physiological aspects of watching someone eat, and their perceived social relationship with mukbangers. Based on our findings, we propose design implications for remote commensality, and for synchronized multisensorial video streaming content.
Among many young people, the creation of a finsta—a portmanteau of "fake" and "Instagram" which describes secondary Instagram accounts—provides an outlet to share emotional, low-quality, or indecorous content with their close friends. To study why people create and maintain finstas, we conducted a qualitative study through interviews with finsta users and content analysis of video bloggers exposing their finsta on YouTube. We found that one way that young people deal with mounting social pressures is by reconfiguring online platforms and changing their purposes, norms, expectations, and currencies. Carving out smaller spaces accessible only to close friends allows users the opportunity for a more unguarded, vulnerable, and unserious performance. Drawing on feminist theory, we term this process intimate reconfiguration. Through this reconfiguration finsta users repurpose an existing and widely-used social platform to create opportunities for more meaningful and reciprocal forms of social support.