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Category: Project

Description: Social media have become important environments for people to express and explore their political views. Yet relatively little is known about how affordances provided by social media platforms affect whether and how users express political opinions. This is an important area of inquiry, given that these affordances are theorized to shape the psychological “self-effects” that can occur on social media. For example, existing theory predicts that, under certain conditions, expressing political opinions in social media may strengthen the opinion certainty of the expresser. This registered report proposes a laboratory experiment that varies the level of message persistence of a social media platform (i.e., the temporal extent to which messages can be accessed by users) and tests its effects on participants’ actual expressive actions (i.e., articulation of political stances and expression strategies) and how it influences self-effects. This research will help clarify how social media environments with different levels of message persistence shape political expression and ultimately affect the attitudes of the expresser themselves.