Testing Waters, Sending Clues: Indirect Disclosures of Socially Stigmatized Experiences on Social Media

Indirect disclosure strategies include hinting about an experience or a facet of one’s identity or relaying information explicitly but through another person. These strategies lend themselves to sharing stigmatized or sensitive experiences such as a pregnancy loss, mental illness, or abuse. Drawing on interviews with women in the U.S. who use social media and experienced pregnancy loss, we investigated factors guiding indirect disclosure decisions on social media. Our findings include 1) a typology of indirect disclosure strategies based on content obviousness, original content creator, and content sharer, and 2) an examination of indirect disclosure decision factors related to the self, audience, platform affordances, and temporality. We identify how people intentionally adapt social media and indirect disclosures to meet psychological (e.g., keeping a personal record) and social (e.g., feeling out the audience) needs associated with loss. We discuss implications for design and research, including features that support disclosures through proxy, and relevance for algorithmic detection and intervention. CAUTION: This paper includes quotes about pregnancy loss.