Abstract
Social media platforms increasingly give users the option of ephemerality through settings that delete or hide posted content after a set period of time. Many individuals apply these settings to manage their posting history and, in turn, reduce concerns about self-presentation. Despite the growing popularity of this feature, few studies have empirically explored it. This study examines the Time Limit setting on WeChat Moments as an example and investigates how users using the Time Limit setting differ from nonusers in terms of personal characteristics (demographics, personality traits, psychological factors, and previous behavioral patterns) and social characteristics (audience size and audience diversity). Compared with nonusers, users using Time Limit setting scored significantly higher on posting frequency and privacy setting use and scored significantly lower on audience size. We also examine how personal and social characteristics vary between user groups with different degrees of ephemerality (i.e., low, medium, or high). Our findings show that users using the Time Limit setting who scored higher on measures of life changes, self-monitoring, posting frequency, and audience size and lower on perceived stress were more likely to opt for the low (i.e., 6months) rather than the medium (i.e., 1month) or high (i.e., 3days) degree of ephemerality. Our work contributes to the understanding of ephemerality settings on social media platforms and provides insights that help practitioners design more effective platforms.
Highlights
Most social media platforms keep past posts online indefinitely to help users with their longterm self-presentation and interactions with others (Zhao et al, 2013; Özkul and Humphreys, 2015)
This study examines the differences between users and nonusers of ephemerality settings by focusing on their personal and social characteristics, using the Time Limit setting on WeChat Moments as an example
We demonstrated that individuals with larger audience size would be less likely to employ the Time Limit setting, implying the negative impact of ephemerality feature on social interactions, which enrich the literature on negative consequences of using ephemerality in social media (Bayer et al, 2016; Cavalcanti et al, 2017)
Summary
Most social media platforms keep past posts online indefinitely to help users with their longterm self-presentation and interactions with others (Zhao et al, 2013; Özkul and Humphreys, 2015). This feature may create challenges for users when past posts are inconsistent with their current self-presentation (Schoenebeck et al, 2016; Huang et al, 2020). As such, it is becoming increasingly common for social media platforms to allow users to make their posted content ephemeral using relevant settings (Xu et al, 2016; Chen and Cheung, 2019). They experience certain types of loss such as media loss (e.g., the failure to save photographs) or context loss (e.g., the lack of a message history; Cavalcanti et al, 2017)
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