Hi everybody, thank you for being here. It gives me immense pleasure to present
our work on understanding life event disclosures on social media.
To get a holistic understanding of an individual's ecology we need to understand
what happens to an individual's lives and ups and downs are inevitable in our lives.
Now such events that can leave a significant impact
are often called as life events and these events could be a wedding,
pregnancy announcement, a death in the family or getting fired or promoted at work.
As social media platforms continually emerge as an important part of many of our lives,
they serve many needs and purposes surrounding these ups and downs,
we often record and post such events on social media
and these platforms also have explicit affordances to do so such as the facebook timeline reminds
us of our birthdays and personal milestones. Now for a better user experience these platforms
conduct personalized algorithmic content curation. These algorithms largely rely on
topics, interests, and social connections, but rarely account for an individual's life events.
But if the algorithms are not sensitive to our lives, they may cause harms.
For example, when the facebook user was shown his year in review with his now dead daughter's
picture, he felt the feature to be emotionally triggering, labeling the newsfeed algorithm as
inadvertently cruel due to its insensitivity. This calls for a critical need to understand
social media disclosures of life events which we essentially do in this work.
So with that in mind in this work we examine
what life events people disclose or withhold on social media,
and what individual and event attributes explain life event disclosures on social media.
So participants shared their year-long facebook data and self-reported surveys
on individual differences and at the end of the year we also asked these participants
to record their major life events using the validated very life event survey scale.
We compare how in the moment disclosures on facebook
differ from retrospective self-reported service.
Now as a contribution of the work we operationalize a definition of life
event disclosures on social media and also provide an extensive code book to identify
and study life event disclosures on social media. We find that among the various categories of life
events social media disclosures tend to be mostly around personal life events including weddings
vacations and family time together whereas financial events such as capital gains or losses
or even work-related events like getting promoted or fired are rarely disclosed on social media.
Now we also investigated the characteristics of disclosing a life event on social media
we find that social media disclosures tend to be emotional and expressive.
We also find co-occurring relative and causal events
such as when an individual change jobs they posted about how they moved to a new place.
We also found social media events tend to be mainly about positive events for
example when an individual who went on a vacation and posted about it on Facebook,
also went through a breakup during the same period but never disclosed about it on Facebook.
Now these are unique evidences of how people disclose life events on social media.
We also investigated factors as associated with different life event disclosures where we build
regression models with individual attributes such as demographics and personal psychological traits
and event attributes such as how recent is the event, or the significance of the event,
or the valence or the positivity or negativity of the event, anticipation and intimacy of the event.
So we find that when an event is positive or anticipated,
it is more likely to be posted on social media
whereas significant recent and intimate events are less disclosed on social media.
So this study highlights several insights regarding disclosure and
non-disclosure behaviors on social media and in a nutshell these are surrounding
the theoretical underpinnings of what life events are publicly disclosed on social media
versus what events tend to be only privately reported to a group of researchers.
Moreover, our work bears design implications in designing social media platforms that are
sensitive and careful about people's disclosure and non-disclosure choices on the platform.
With that, I encourage you all to reach out read our paper
and I'll be very happy to answer any questions. So feel free to reach out to me either during
the conference or later. Thank you very much