Does Social Media Encourage Sharing or Self-censorship?

This article was written by Heather Risley, a strategic communications specialist on the Feed the Future Knowledge-Driven Agricultural Development project. She attended the Social Media and Society 2014 conference in Toronto, Canada.

Social media platforms often provide many benefits: ease of access to information, wider audience reach, increased diversity of connections, and greater awareness of issues people might otherwise ignore, to name a few. For those in the business of sharing knowledge among diverse populations, these social media benefits sound like good news. Recent Pew Research Center data, however, suggests that increased awareness of others’ opinions may have a down side too. During the Social Media and Society 2014 conference, held in Toronto, Canada, September 27-28, keynote speaker and Rutgers Associate Professor Keith Hampton presented new research on the effects of social media in modern society. 

Pervasive and persistent contact is a key feature of modern social networks that differentiates them from industrial and pre-industrial ones, Hampton explains. This means that as we’ve become more mobile, the people in our lives are members of different networks (work, personal, community, political, etc.) and tend to stay connected to us, regardless of geographical or life changes. Byproducts of pervasive and persistent contact are a higher degree of social capital (or the perceived value the individual is afforded because of the connection to other individuals), Hampton says, and a wider exposure to diverse individuals who may not share your interests, values, or opinions.

That said, there is an important distinction between “being aware” of diverse interests, values, or opinions, and “voicing” those perspectives, Hampton adds. The Pew Research Center evidence suggests that as people become more aware of diverse viewpoints within their social networks, they start to censor themselves out of a fear of becoming isolated. As part of the Pew Research Internet Project, Hampton and his fellow researchers are calling this phenomenon the “spiral of silence” (see “Social Media and the ‘Spiral of Silence’”). 

These findings have several implications for people interested in engaging audiences to share information, participate in discussions, collaborate, and learn from each other, including:

1. Social media like other tools has its limits and is not a panacea for community building and knowledge generation.
2. Community facilitators should be attentive to how comfortable participants are with speaking up online. It may that social media can play a role in organizing a network, but more active social engagement may require a closed online forum or face-to-face exchanges.
3. Because social media offers more autonomy in choosing topics to pursue, community members may tend to flock to what is familiar. If the objective is to focus on a particular issue where diverse opinions are sought, social media may act as an echo chamber of people who share points of view.

In sum, understanding people’s behavior on social media is crucial to using the tool successfully. While seemingly self-evident, changes in technology are moving at such a fast pace that it’s easy to forget about the humans behind the screens.

To learn more about current research on the implications of social media in society, visit the Social Media and Society 2014 conference website.