“Time spent on platform” is a widely used measure in many studies examining social media use and well-being, yet the current literature presents unresolved findings about the relationship between time on platform and well-being. In this paper, we consider the moderating effect of people’s mindsets about social media — whether they think a platform is good or bad for themselves and for society more generally. Combining survey responses from 29,284 participants in 15 countries with server-logged data of Facebook use, we found that when people thought that Facebook was good for them and for society, time spent on the platform was not significantly associated with well-being. Conversely, when they thought Facebook was bad, greater time spent was associated with lower well-being. On average, there was a small, negative correlation between time spent and well-being and the causal direction is not known. Beliefs had a stronger moderating relationship when time-spent measures were self-reported rather than coming from server logs. We discuss potential mechanisms for these results and implications for future research on well-being and social media use.

Many studies examining social media use rely on self-report survey questions about how much time participants spend on social media platforms. Because they are challenging to answer accurately and susceptible to various biases, these self-reported measures are known to contain error -- although the specific contours of this error are not well understood. This paper compares data from ten self-reported Facebook use survey measures deployed in 15 countries (N = 49,934) against data from Facebook's server logs to describe factors associated with error in commonly used survey items from the literature. Self-reports were moderately correlated with actual Facebook use (r = 0.42 for the best-performing question), though participants significantly overestimated how much time they spent on Facebook and underestimated the number of times they visited. People who spent a lot of time on the platform were more likely to misreport their time, as were teens and younger adults, which is notable because of the high reliance on college-aged samples in many fields. We conclude with recommendations on the most accurate ways to collect time-spent data via surveys.

As social media platforms witness more and more contributions from participants during developing crisis events, some platforms provide affordances that support visibility for specific pieces of information. However, the design of information visibility, especially in the context of controlling information flows (through gatekeeping), may shape how participants collect and share up-to-date information in these systems. This paper looks at the field site of reddit.com through trace ethnography methods to understand how the design of reddit's platform (from algorithms to user roles) impacts the visibility of information and subsequently how participants aggregate information in response to ongoing events. Through trace ethnographic analysis, we illustrate three themes related to tensions around visibility - behavioral, structural, and relational - and show how visibility shapes the work of producing information about crises in social news sites.

Citizen participation in crisis communication increasingly occurs in social media contexts. As some platforms -- e.g., social news sites -- evolve around collaborative voting, filtering, and information sharing, the aggregation of breaking news information during crisis situations appears more often as an emergent practice in these online communities. Drawing from 53 interviews and descriptive quantitative analysis of reddit posts and comments, this paper presents a qualitative case study examining reddit.com members aggregate information during crisis events within the context of reddit's post/comment structure, crowd voting, and ranking algorithms. Using the lens of network gatekeeping, the paper shows how participants evaluate sources, organize information, and verify details to demonstrate how different affordances and limitations of information production allow or restrict particular types of network gatekeeping.

Non-verbal communication plays a large role in online competitive multiplayer games, as team members attempt to coordinate with each other without distraction to achieve victory. Some games enable this communication through "pings," alerts that are easy to activate and provide auditory and visual cues for teammates. In this paper, we review the literature on gestures and non-verbal communication and, through an empirical analysis of 84,489 players across 10,293 matches in the popular game, League of Legends, illustrate ping use in multiplayer games and test the impact of ping actions on performance in teams. We show that the amount of pings depends on player role and in-game activity and that pings by players have a positive but concave relationship with player performance. These findings demonstrate the importance of non-verbal communication and interruption on the performance of virtual team members. We conclude by discussing the implications of these results for theorizing and designing sociotechnical systems that rely on users to engage in synchronous, collaborative work in shared visual spaces.

Virtual teams have become a ubiquitous form of organizing, but the impact of social structures within and between teams on group performance remains understudied. This paper uses the case study of a massively multiplayer online game and server log data from over 10,000 players to examine the connection between group social capital (operationalized through guild network structure measures) and team effectiveness, given a variety of in-game social networks. Three different networks, social, task, and exchange networks, are compared and contrasted while controlling for group size, group age, and player experience. Team effectiveness is maximized at a roughly moderate level of closure across the networks, suggesting that this is the optimal level of the group's network density. Guilds with high brokerage, meaning they have diverse connections with other groups, were more effective in achievement-oriented networks. In addition, guilds with central leaders were more effective when they teamed up with other guild leaders.

In most sociotechnical systems, individuals are tracked through user accounts. This paper explores the various ways in which people create and use multiple user representations, specifically in online games. Using 8 years of population data from a popular multiplayer online game, EVE Online, we examine how multiple character creation and use occurs at scale and how operationalization of individuals between accounts and characters impacts methods. We suggest that conceptualizing participants in online games based on the assumption that one character equals one individual can lead to incorrect analyses regarding the demographics or behaviors of the population. Additionally, social network analysis suggests that a character-centric, rather than account-level, viewpoint can change the results of statistical relationships with network metrics such as eigenvector centrality.

This paper explores temporary identities on social media platforms and individuals' uses of these identities with respect to their perceptions of anonymity. Given the research on multiple profile maintenance, little research has examined the role that some social media platforms play in affording users with temporary identities. Further, most of the research on anonymity stops short of the concept of varying perceptions of anonymity. This paper builds on these research areas by describing the phenomenon of temporary "throwaway accounts" and their uses on reddit.com, a popular social news site. In addition to ethnographic trace analysis to examine the contexts in which throwaway accounts are adopted, this paper presents a predictive model that suggests that perceptions of anonymity significantly shape the potential uses of throwaway accounts and that women are much more likely to adopt temporary identities than men.

This paper uses the case of Hurricane Sandy and reddit's topical community (subreddit) /r/sandy to examine the production and curation of news content around events on a social news site. Through qualitative analysis, we provide a coded topology of produced content and describe how types of networked gatekeeping impact the framing of a crisis situation. This study also examines, through quantitative modeling, what kind of information becomes negotiated and voted as relevant. We suggest that highly scored content shared in a social news setting focused more on human-interest media and perspective-based citizen journalism than professional news reports. We conclude by discussing how the mechanisms of social news sites conflict with the social norms and culture of reddit to produce differing expectations around news.