“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.

People compare themselves to one another both offline and online. The specific online activities that worsen social comparison are partly understood, though much existing research relies on people recalling their own online activities post hoc and is situated in only a few countries. To better understand social comparison worldwide and the range of associated behaviors on social media, a survey of 38,000 people from 18 countries was paired with logged activity on Facebook for the prior month. People who reported more frequent social comparison spent more time on Facebook, had more friends, and saw proportionally more social content on the site. They also saw greater amounts of feedback on friends' posts and proportionally more positivity. There was no evidence that social comparison happened more with acquaintances than close friends. One in five respondents recalled recently seeing a post that made them feel worse about themselves but reported conflicting views: half wished they hadn't seen the post, while a third felt very happy for the poster. Design opportunities are discussed, including hiding feedback counts, filters for topics and people, and supporting meaningful interactions, so that when comparisons do occur, people are less affected by them.

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.

Social comparison is a common focus in discussions of online social media use, and differences in its frequency, causes, and outcomes may arise from country or cultural differences. To understand how these differences play a role in experiences of social comparison on Facebook, a survey of 37,729 people across 18 countries was paired with respondents' activity on Facebook. The findings were augmented with 39 in-person interviews in three countries. Social comparison frequency was more strongly predicted by country than by age, gender, and Facebook activity combined, indicating that country differences are important to consider when studying social comparison. Women's and men's experiences differed greatly between countries. Exposure to high feedback counts on friends' posts was associated with more frequent social comparison, but only in some countries. Design interventions that account for such country differences may be more effective at reducing the negative outcomes of social comparison.

While many people use social network sites to connect with friends and family, some feel that their use is problematic, seriously affecting their sleep, work, or life. Pairing a survey of 20,000 Facebook users measuring perceptions of problematic use with behavioral and demographic data, we examined Facebook activities associated with problematic use as well as the kinds of people most likely to experience it. People who feel their use is problematic are more likely to be younger, male, and going through a major life event such as a breakup. They spend more time on the platform, particularly at night, and spend proportionally more time looking at profiles and less time browsing their News Feeds. They also message their friends more frequently. While they are more likely to respond to notifications, they are also more likely to deactivate their accounts, perhaps in an effort to better manage their time. Further, they are more likely to have seen content about social media or phone addiction. Notably, people reporting problematic use rate the site as more valuable to them, highlighting the complex relationship between technology use and well-being. A better understanding of problematic Facebook use can inform the design of context-appropriate and supportive tools to help people become more in control.

Giving gifts is a fundamental part of human relationships that is being affected by technology. The Internet enables people to give at the last minute and over long distances, and to observe friends giving and receiving gifts. How online gift giving spreads in social networks is therefore important to understand. We examine 1.5 million gift exchanges on Facebook and show that receiving a gift causes individuals to be 56% more likely to give a gift in the future. Additional surveys show that online gift giving was more socially acceptable to those who learned about it by observing friends' participation instead of a non-social encouragement. Most receivers pay the gift forward instead of reciprocating directly online, although surveys revealed additional instances of direct reciprocity, where the initial gifting occurred offline. Thus, social influence promotes the spread of online gifting, which both complements and substitutes for offline gifting.

Life is more than cat pictures. There are tough days, heartbreak, and hugs. Under what contexts do people share these feelings online, and how do their friends respond? Using millions of de-identified Facebook status updates with poster-annotated feelings (e.g., “feeling thankful” or “feeling worried”), we examine the magnitude and circumstances in which people share positive or negative feelings and characterize the nature of the responses they receive. We find that people share greater proportions of both positive and negative emotions when their friend networks are smaller and denser. Consistent with social sharing theory, hearing about a friend's troubles on Facebook causes friends to reply with more emotional and supportive comments. Friends' comments are also more numerous and longer. Posts with positive feelings, on the other hand, receive more likes, and their comments have more positive language. Feelings that relate to the poster's self worth, such as “feeling defeated,” “feeling unloved,” or “feeling accomplished” amplify these effects.

What social value do Likes on Facebook hold? This research examines people's attitudes and behaviors related to receiving one-click feedback in social media. Likes and other kinds of lightweight affirmation serve as social cues of acceptance and maintain interpersonal relationships, but may mean different things to different people. Through surveys and de-identified, aggregated behavioral Facebook data, we find that in general, people care more about who Likes their posts than how many Likes they receive, desiring feedback most from close friends, romantic partners, and family members other than their parents. While most people do not feel strongly that receiving “enough” Likes is important, roughly two-thirds of posters regularly receive more than “enough.” We also note a “Like paradox,” a phenomenon in which people's friends receive more Likes because their friends have more friends to provide those Likes. Individuals with lower levels of self-esteem and higher levels of self-monitoring are more likely to think that Likes are important and to feel bad if they do not receive “enough” Likes. The results inform product design and our understanding of how lightweight interactions shape our experiences online.

Social networking sites (SNSs) offer users a platform to build and maintain social connections. Understanding when people feel comfortable sharing information about themselves on SNSs is critical to a good user experience, because self-disclosure helps maintain friendships and increase relationship closeness. This observational research develops a machine learning model to measure self-disclosure in SNSs and uses it to understand the contexts where it is higher or lower. Features include emotional valence, social distance between the poster and people mentioned in the post, the language similarity between the post and the community and post topic. To validate the model and advance our understanding about online self-disclosure, we applied it to de-identified, aggregated status updates from Facebook users. Results show that women self-disclose more than men. People with a stronger desire to manage impressions self-disclose less. Network size is negatively associated with self-disclosure, while tie strength and network density are positively associated.

Scientists debate whether people grow closer to their friends through social networking sites like Facebook, whether those sites displace more meaningful interaction, or whether they simply reflect existing ties. Combining server log analysis and longitudinal surveys of 3,649 Facebook users reporting on relationships with 26,134 friends, we find that communication on the site is associated with changes in reported relationship closeness, over and above effects attributable to their face-to-face, phone, and email contact. Tie strength increases with both one-on-one communication, such as posts, comments, and messages, and through reading friends' broadcasted content, such as status updates and photos. The effect is greater for composed pieces, such as comments, posts, and messages than for 'one-click' actions such as 'likes.' Facebook has a greater impact on non-family relationships and ties who do not frequently communicate via other channels.

When you share content in an online social network, who is listening? Users have scarce information about who actually sees their content, making their audience seem invisible and difficult to estimate. However, understanding this invisible audience can impact both science and design, since perceived audiences influence content production and self-presentation online. In this paper, we combine survey and large-scale log data to examine how well users' perceptions of their audience match their actual audience on Facebook. We find that social media users consistently underestimate their audience size for their posts, guessing that their audience is just 27% of its true size. Qualitative coding of survey responses reveals folk theories that attempt to reverse-engineer audience size using feedback and friend count, though none of these approaches are particularly accurate. We analyze audience logs for 222,000 Facebook users' posts over the course of one month and find that publicly visible signals --- friend count, likes, and comments --- vary widely and do not strongly indicate the audience of a single post. Despite the variation, users typically reach 61% of their friends each month. Together, our results begin to reveal the invisible undercurrents of audience attention and behavior in online social networks.

Although both men and women communicate frequently on Facebook, we know little about what they talk about, whether their topics differ and how their network responds. Using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), we identify topics from more than half a million Facebook status updates and determine which topics are more likely to receive feedback, such as likes and comments. Women tend to share more personal topics (e.g., family matters), while men discuss more public ones (e.g., politics and sports). Generally, women receive more feedback than men, but "male" topics (those more often posted by men) receive more feedback, especially when posted by women.

Among those who have recently lost a job, social networks in general and online ones in particular may be useful to cope with stress and find new employment. This study focuses on the psychological and practical consequences of Facebook use following job loss. By pairing longitudinal surveys of Facebook users with logs of their online behavior, we examine how communication with different kinds of ties predicts improvements in stress, social support, bridging social capital, and whether they find new jobs. Losing a job is associated with increases in stress, while talking with strong ties is generally associated with improvements in stress and social support. Weak ties do not provide these benefits. Bridging social capital comes from both strong and weak ties. Surprisingly, individuals who have lost a job feel greater stress after talking with strong ties. Contrary to the "strength of weak ties" hypothesis, communication with strong ties is more predictive of finding employment within three months.

Though social network site use is often treated as a monolithic activity, in which all time is equally social and its impact the same for all users, we examine how Facebook affects social capital depending upon: (1) types of site activities, contrasting one-on-one communication, broadcasts to wider audiences, and passive consumption of social news, and (2) individual differences among users, including social communication skill and self-esteem. Longitudinal surveys matched to server logs from 415 Facebook users reveal that receiving messages from friends is associated with increases in bridging social capital, but that other uses are not. However, using the site to passively consume news assists those with lower social fluency draw value from their connections. The results inform site designers seeking to increase social connectedness and the value of those connections.

Previous research has shown a relationship between use of social networking sites and feelings of social capital. However, most studies have relied on self-reports by college students. The goals of the current study are to (1) validate the common self-report scale using empirical data from Facebook, (2) test whether previous findings generalize to older and international populations, and (3) delve into the specific activities linked to feelings of social capital and loneliness. In particular, we investigate the role of directed interaction between pairs---such as wall posts, comments, and "likes" --- and consumption of friends' content, including status updates, photos, and friends' conversations with other friends. We find that directed communication is associated with greater feelings of bonding social capital and lower loneliness, but has only a modest relationship with bridging social capital, which is primarily related to overall friend network size. Surprisingly, users who consume greater levels of content report reduced bridging and bonding social capital and increased loneliness. Implications for designs to support well-being are discussed.

The defining characteristics of autism, including difficulty with nonverbal cues and need for structure, and the defining characteristics of computer-mediated communication (CMC), including reduction of extraneous cues and structured exchange, suggest the two would be an ideal match. Interviews and observations of 16 adults on the high-functioning end of the autism spectrum reveal that many seek greater social connectedness and take advantage of interest-based online communities to foster successful, supportive relationships. However, CMC intensifies problems of trust, disclosure, inflexible thinking, and perspective-taking, making it difficult for some to maintain relationships. Interventions in the form of information visualization and CMC-specific social skills training are presented. Intervention considerations and participatory design opportunities are discussed.

Social networking sites (SNS) are only as good as the content their users share. Therefore, designers of SNS seek to improve the overall user experience by encouraging members to contribute more content. However, user motivations for contribution in SNS are not well understood. This is particularly true for newcomers, who may not recognize the value of contribution. Using server log data from approximately 140,000 newcomers in Facebook, we predict long-term sharing based on the experiences the newcomers have in their first two weeks. We test four mechanisms: social learning, singling out, feedback, and distribution.

This paper presents a model of the behavior of candidates for promotion to administrator status in Wikipedia. It uses a policy capture framework to highlight similarities and differences in the community's stated criteria for promotion decisions to those criteria actually correlated with promotion success. As promotions are determined by the consensus of dozens of voters with conflicting opinions and unwritten expectations, the results highlight the degree to which consensus is truly reached. The model is fast and easily computable on the fly, and thus could be applied as a self-evaluation tool for editors considering becoming administrators, as a dashboard for voters to view a nominee's relevant statistics, or as a tool to automatically search for likely future administrators. Implications for distributed consensus-building in online communities are discussed.

Little is known about the impact of politeness in online communities. We use an inductive approach to automatically model linguistic politeness in online discussion groups and determine the impact of politeness on desired outcomes, such as increased reply rates. We describe differences in perceived politeness across a variety of groups and find that, controlling for group norms of responsiveness and message length, politeness increases reply rates in some technical groups, but rudeness is more effective in some political groups. The perceived politeness scores will be used to validate linguistic politeness strategies from theory and to inform the creation of a machine learning model of linguistic politeness that can be applied as a "politeness checker" to educate newcomers to write in ways likely to elicit response from specific communities or as a rudeness detection tool for moderators.

Despite its widespread use, voicemail presents numerous usability challenges: People must listen to messages in their entirety, they cannot search by keywords, and audio files do not naturally support visual skimming. SCANMail overcomes these flaws by automatically generating text transcripts of voicemail messages and presenting them in an email-like interface. Transcripts facilitate quick browsing and permanent archive. However, errors from the automatic speech recognition (ASR) hinder the usefulness of the transcripts. The work presented here specifically addresses these problems by evaluating user-initiated error correction of transcripts. User studies of two editor interfaces-a grammar-assisted menu and simple replacement by typing-reveal reduced audio playback times and an emphasis on editing important words with the menu, suggesting its value in mobile environments where limited input capabilities are the norm and user privacy is essential. The study also adds to the scarce body of work on ASR confidence shading, suggesting that shading may be more helpful than previously reported.

The seeming contradiction between “banner blindness” and Web users' complaints about distracting advertisements motivates a pair of experiments into the effect of banner ads on visual search. Experiment 1 measures perceived cognitive workload and search times for short words with two banners on the screen. Four kinds of banners were examined: (1) animated commercial, (2) static commercial, (3) cyan with flashing text, and (4) blank. Using NASA's Task Load Index, participants report increased workload under flashing text banners. Experiment 2 investigates search through news headlines at two levels of difficulty: exact matches and matches requiring semantic interpretation. Results show both animated and static commercial banners decrease visual search speeds. Eye tracking data reveal people rarely look directly at banners. A post hoc memory test confirms low banner recall and, surprisingly, that animated banners are more difficult to remember than static look-alikes. Results have implications for cognitive modeling and Web design.