Essay On Social Media Deletion

Introduction

The past decade and a half have witnessed the booming development of social media and social media research literature. Though being a relatively new phenomenon, researchers have explored social media in various levels and aspects including the definitions and features of social media, social media utility in interpersonal communication, social media’s use in promoting political engagement, public health, social media strategy in organizational communication (Leonardi, Huysman & Steinfield, 2013) marketing (Holly,2013) image management etc.

Although the definition of social media is still under heated discussion, it is widely accepted that social media is based on Web 2.0 and one of the key feature is user generated information. Since the control of information flow is in user’s hand, they can build profiles, publishing contents, comment and delete contents. Previous researches have explored the impacts of many of social media behaviors. However, researches have not yet explored social media deletion, which is a very common phenomenon on social media.

Through conducting a semi-Facebook online experiment and collecting self-reported information about social media deletion, this study examined how deletion is perceived by audience and how different forms of deletion on social media impact audience’s trust, credibly and confidence towards an organization.

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Literature review

Define Social Media

The concept of social media deletion cannot be understood without knowing the definition of social media. According to Merriam-Webster dictionary, social media is “forms of electronic communication (as Web sites for social networking and microblogging) through which users create online comm...

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...iability and validity a pilot study has been conducted. Participants were students from two undergraduate level classes which involving both Chinese and Non-Chinese students. (N=47. 14 Chinese students and 33 non-Chinese students) Participants were asked to read a printout of micro blog thread that contains 15 posts from Sina Weibo among which three involved user deletion, one involved censorship, one claimed to involved in deletion but actually not and others were ordinary posts. After reading the thread, participants were asked to fill a survey that measures awareness, transparency, homophily and generalized belief. The pilot study show that about half of the deletion can be recognized by students. The measurement that we used held up well but several items has been dropped from the measurement scaled. The items kept in the final scale can be seen in Appendix I.