Altruistic and selfish communication on social media: the moderating effects of tie strength and interpersonal trust

ABSTRACT

Individuals share a diversity of content on social media for a variety of reasons. Research has often described and explained disclosure via the application of a subjective cost–benefit analysis framed around reciprocity, suggesting that people communicate selfishly motivated by the expectation of receiving something in return. This paper investigates the moderating effects of tie strength and interpersonal trust on the relationship between expected reciprocity and intensity of communication between two social media connections. A Facebook application presented participants with a random set of their friends and asked them to rate their friendships in terms of these values. Overall, 90 participants rated 1728 friendships, while the application collected 11 activity variables depicting the actual communication that has taken place in each pair of connections. A principal component analysis was used to distinguish between text- and photograph-related communication, and two moderated multiple regressions were conducted to establish the moderating effects. The results show significant moderating effects of tie strength and trust on the communication around photographs, but not around text. This study contributes to communication research by explicating the ways that tie strength and trust affect patterns of communication on social media. Implications for social media researchers and designers are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Online disclosure
• tie strength
• trust
• reciprocity
• rational choice theory
• photographs

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Diogo Pereira for his technical contribution during the data collection process, as well as everyone who took part in the study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 It is worth mentioning that Facebook has been increasingly limiting access to social graph data (i.e. the specific connections among persons and between people and digital entities on the platform) via the Facebook API. Most notably, since 2015 a standard third party can only access a user’s friends if those friends also use the app. The current study utilises a dataset from July–August 2012, before this change took effect (see Hogan 2018 for further discussion on the details and the implications of these changes).

Additional information

Funding

The work reported in this paper was partly supported by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia - FCT) research grant SFRH/BD/65908/2009.