Causal effects of affordance change on communication behavior: Empirical evidence from organizational and leadership social media use

Abstract

This article provides empirical evidence for two hypotheses in the affordance literature. First, by leveraging a small affordance change — Twitter increasing its character limit from 140 to 280 on November 7, 2017, employing an instrumental variable approach, and examining 143,771 original tweets published by organizational and leadership accounts half a year before and after the intervention, we showed the direct causal relationship between affordances and communication behavior on digital media platforms. Second, by exploring what factors could explain the heterogeneity of causal effects, we showed that previous endogenous perceptions of communication constraint predicted later behavioral changes, despite the same exogenous intervention. These findings highlight the role of human agencies in the face of technological changes and provide empirical support for the affordance approach to information communication technologies (ICTs) as a reconciliation between technological determinism and social constructivism.