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The merging of audiences in social media and the variety of participation structures they present, including different audience sizes and interaction targets, pose questions about how people respond to these new communication situations. This research examined self-presentational and relational concerns through the analysis of language styles on Facebook. The authors collected a corpus of status updates, wall posts, and private messages from 79 participants. These messages varied in certain characteristics of language style, revealing differences in underlying self-presentational and relational concerns based on the publicness and directedness of the interaction. Positive emotion words correlated with self-reported self-presentational concerns in status updates, suggesting a strategic use of sharing positive emotions in public and nondirected communication via status updates. Verbal immediacy correlated with partner familiarity in wall posts but not in private messages, suggesting that verbal immediacy cues serve as markers to differentiate between more and less familiar partners in public wall posts.

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Designing technical systems to be resistant to bias and discrimination represents vital new terrain for researchers, policymakers, and the anti-discrimination project more broadly. We consider bias and discrimination in the context of popular online dating and hookup platforms in the United States, which we call intimate platforms. Drawing on work in social-justice-oriented and Queer HCI, we review design features of popular intimate platforms and their potential role in exacerbating or mitigating interpersonal bias. We argue that focusing on platform design can reveal opportunities to reshape troubling patterns of intimate contact without overriding users' decisional autonomy. We identify and address the difficult ethical questions that nevertheless come along with such intervention, while urging the social computing community to engage more deeply with issues of bias, discrimination, and exclusion in the study and design of intimate platforms.

Commenting on social media posts is an important part of interaction on Facebook and other social media sites. The number of comments people receive has been linked to their experience on social media, but less is known about how the content of comments relates to both the original posts and posters’ communicative outcomes, such as their mood and satisfaction with the interaction. The present study analyzed 822 Facebook status updates from a sample of 233 participants, along with 1175 corresponding comments, to determine how post, comment, and outcome characteristics are interrelated. We found congruence in valence and intimacy between status updates and comments, supporting the reciprocity principle of self-disclosure. Controlling for the number of comments and the content of posts, the content of comments mattered for satisfaction: more intimate comments were associated with higher levels of interaction satisfaction, and both intimacy and positive valence of comments were associated with more lasting effects on mood.