They are Watching Me: A Self-Presentational Approach to Political Expression on Facebook

Abstract

ABSTRACT Following the scholarship that highlights situational influences on political expression, the present study conceptualizes political expression on social network sites (SNSs) as a form of self-presentation and posits that SNS audiences can make users feel lost socially and economically, which could influence political expression through self-presentational concern. Results of a 3 (target audience: family, casual friends, work relations) × 2 (issue: affirmative action vs. immigration) between-subjects experiment (N = 360) revealed that across both issues social costs heightened self-presentational concern, which motivated strategic self-presentation in political expressions. In immigration conditions, work relations exhibited more economic costs than family and causal friends, which heightened self-presentational concern and subsequently motivated political self-presentation. Moreover, in immigration conditions, perceived opinion incongruence moderated the relationship between social costs and self-presentational concern. This study proposed a self-presentational approach to understanding public expressions of political opinion on SNSs, extended the spiral of silence theory, and developed research on online self-presentation.