TOXIC BEHAVIORS IN SOCIAL MEDIA: AN ANALYSIS OF RAPPORT THREAT BEHAVIORS IN SOCIAL MEDIA INTERACTIONS

Abstract

Toxic Behaviors are what people do that irritate, annoy, or cause unpleasant feeling to others. These behaviors may cause other people to be depressed, angry, furious, sad, and anxious. In Rapport Management (Spencer-Oatey, 2000), these toxic behaviors are known as rapport threat behaviors since this kind of behaviors can threaten other people interpersonal rapport which is essential for harmonizing relationships between people. The main purpose of this study was to analyze these threatening behaviors to rapport in social media interactions. Social media interactions are the interactions found in social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, MySpace, and other platforms. The sample for this study was the interactions in two social media platforms which are Facebook and Instagram. The study found that there are several rapport threat behaviors in the two social media platforms interactions. The rapport threat behaviors are accusations, insults, trash talks, the inappropriate use of emoji, the use of all capitalized letters and misunderstanding context and the captions of certain posts.