Distress Disclosure across Social Media Platforms during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Untangling the Effects of Platforms, Affordances, and Audiences

Title of the Paper

Distress Disclosure across Social Media Platforms during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Untangling the Effects of Platforms, Affordances, and Audiences

Paper Information

• Research Area: Study of distress disclosure behavior on social media
• Keywords: social media, self-disclosure, stress, mental health, media affordances, social networks

Research Background and Problem

• Identified Issues or Challenges:
  • During the COVID-19 pandemic, distress disclosure behavior on social media significantly increased, yet there is limited research on how platforms, affordances, and audiences collectively influence such behavior.
  • Social media affordances (e.g., anonymity, information persistence, and visibility control) may interact with individual and contextual factors, but current understanding of these interactions is limited.
• Significance:
  • Understanding how and why people share negative emotions and experiences on social media is crucial for promoting mental health support, especially during global crises.
• Research Motivation and Related Work:
  • Existing studies primarily focus on disclosure behavior on a single platform or specific types of negative experiences (e.g., depression, sexual abuse). Few studies comprehensively examine distress disclosure behavior across multiple platforms, affordances, and audience contexts.
  • This study aims to fill this research gap by exploring how contextual and non-contextual factors jointly influence disclosure depth and satisfaction from an ecological perspective.

Proposed Solution

• Proposed Methods or Solutions:
  • This study introduces the concept of "social media disclosure ecology," combining affordance theory with contextual privacy and self-disclosure theory to comprehensively examine the relationships between platforms, affordances, audiences, and disclosure behavior.
• Innovations:
  • Integrates ecological and affordance perspectives to highlight cross-platform user behavior patterns and the importance of multi-level factors in disclosure decisions.
  • Goes beyond focusing on individual affordance elements to explore interactions between affordances, as well as between affordances and audience or personal factors.
• Implementation Steps and Techniques:
  1. Collected survey data from 470 U.S. adults to examine their distress disclosure behavior across 17 platforms.
  2. Measured platform affordances (anonymity, information persistence, visibility control) and audience characteristics (relationship intimacy, size).
  3. Used multiple regression analysis and mediation effects to reveal the relationships between affordances, disclosure depth, and satisfaction.
  4. Conducted interaction effect analysis to explore how affordances and individual characteristics jointly predict disclosure behavior.

Research Findings

• Specific Findings:
  • Platform affordances have a significant positive impact on disclosure depth, particularly anonymity, information persistence, and visibility control.
  • Disclosure depth is significantly influenced by the intimacy of the relationship with the audience, but audience size has no significant effect.
  • The number of COVID-19-related stressors has a weaker impact on disclosure depth.
  • Interaction effects exist between platform affordances and relationship intimacy; for example, high visibility control combined with intimate relationships leads to deeper disclosure.
  • Satisfaction after disclosure is directly influenced by disclosure depth, while affordances (e.g., content persistence, anonymity, and visibility control) have an indirect effect on satisfaction.
• Advantages:
  • Reveals the complex dynamics of disclosure behavior through an ecological perspective, focusing not only on individual factors but also on the interactions between multiple factors.
  • Provides concrete recommendations for social media design to enhance user mental health support experiences.
• Experimental or Evaluation Results:
  • Analysis shows that perceived affordances, audience intimacy, and disclosure tendencies are key factors influencing disclosure behavior and satisfaction.
  • Regression models indicate that contextual and non-contextual factors collectively explain 46% of the variance in disclosure depth.
• Limitations and Future Directions:
  • Self-reported data may be subject to recall bias and social desirability bias; future studies could incorporate behavioral tracking for validation.
  • This study is cross-sectional and cannot capture long-term changes or evolution in disclosure behavior.
  • Focused only on the U.S. context; future research should conduct cross-cultural studies to verify the generalizability of the findings.
  • Limited to examining three affordances; future studies could explore the impact of other affordances (e.g., network connectivity, information visibility) on disclosure behavior.