"You Don't Have To Know My Past": How WeChat Moments Users Manage Their Evolving Self-Presentation

DOI

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.