THE VALUE AFFORDANCES OF SOCIAL MEDIA ENGAGEMENT FEATURES

Abstract

Like, Comment, and Share are ubiquitous features and central elements of engagement on social media platforms. Yet the values promoted by such features remain an open question. We propose the concept of value affordances, defined as the set of ethical, aesthetic, and relational principles that emerge from the interaction between different stakeholders and technological infrastructures. We develop a novel method for studying value affordances through focus groups to explore the engagement features of Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. Across platforms, our participants agreed that engagement features promote expression, care, and community, aligning with how companies promote their platforms. They also agreed that engagement features hinder privacy, mindfulness, peace, and safety, echoing public concerns about the harmful consequences of social media. Their accounts typically downplayed the role of technology, instead emphasizing user agency and responsibility. We discuss how users navigate tradeoffs in the value affordances of social media through creative strategies to negotiate, downplay, or even resolve these tensions. These include using features antagonistically, avoiding using specific features, or using features in more limited contexts like groups or direct messages. Users also negotiate value tradeoffs through how they assign responsibility for promoting or hindering particular values. While our participants consistently emphasized the agency of users, they differentiated responsibility into categories of "us" and "them," identifying with positive actions that promote values and blaming others for negative actions that hinder values.