Understanding Gender Differences in Social Media “like” Behavior : Empathy, Social Support, Relationship Building and Information Sharing

Abstract Internet trolling, or the intentional disturbance or upsetting of others on social media for personal amusement, has become increasingly prevalent in recent years (Howard et al., 2019). Current research focuses on these destructive social media behaviors in younger populations, therefore this study set out to investigate the gender differences of trolling behaviors in Baby Boomers. Participants (N = 140), ages 54 and older, were recruited from the Amazon Mechanical Turk and were compensated for their participation. Participants completed a survey investigating their likelihood to engage in trolling behaviors, the extent to which they enjoy trolling, and their feelings while trolling. Results indicated that while there were no significant differences between men and women in their need, intensity of use, or addiction to social media, men were significantly more likely to engage in trolling behaviors than women. Men reported posting to upset others (p = .018), as well as commenting to upset others (p = .053), more often than women. Furthermore, when engaging in these behaviors, men reported feeling intelligent (p = .013), confident (p = .024), superior (p = .053), and happy (p = .012), more often than women. However, these results could be indicative of a more sinister issue. Men also reported more often that their reasons for engaging in trolling behaviors were feelings of loneliness (p = .005) and anxiety (p = .010). This indicates that these trolling behaviors may then be a way for men to seek out some form of “social support” in the online community.

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Gender Differences in Time-based Work-family Conflict and the Use of Social Support

PsycEXTRA Dataset ◽

10.1037/e741342011-116 ◽

2009 ◽

Author(s):

Dianhan Zheng ◽

Traci Craig

Keyword(s):

Social Support ◽

Gender Differences ◽

Family Conflict ◽

Work Family Conflict ◽

Work Family

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AN EXPLORATION OF GENDER DIFFERENCES IN TEENAGERS’ USE, CONSUMPTION AND DIGITAL PRODUCTION

NORDSCI Conference proceedings, Book 1 Volume 3 ◽

10.32008/nordsci2020/b1/v3/24 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Corina-Maricica Seserman ◽

Daniela Cojocaru

Keyword(s):

Gender Differences ◽

Social Media ◽

Data Collection ◽

Gender Identity ◽

Online Survey ◽

Peer Group ◽

Methodological Approach ◽

Digital Content ◽

Media Consumption ◽

The Way

Today’s teenagers have a very close relationship with ICTs and the digital space related to them, as they have impacted the way the youth constructs their sense of self and the tools they use to perform their carefully constructed identity. One key element which influences the way one constructs their views by themselves is within the boundaries set by their biological sex and therefore through the behaviors associated with their asigned gender. Through the symbolic interactionist lense, or more specifically through Goffman's dramaturgical theory on the manner in which one presents him/herself in society, this paper looks at the manner in which teenagers use social media platforms and at the way they consume and create digital content in order to present their gender identity. The way teenagers consume and produce digital content differs and depends on how they interpret their ideals of femininity and masculinity, which are afterwards reproduced in the content they post on their social media pages. Therefore this research is an attempt to understand what are the factors teenagers take in account when consuming and producing content. What gender differences can be observed in regards to new media consumption? What difference can be observed in online activity behaviors between males and females? How do they feel about their gender identity concerning fitting in with their peer group? A mix-methodological approach was engaged in the data collection process. In the first stage of the research highschool students (n=324) from the city of Suceava (Romania) participated in taking an online survey. The initial intent was to meet with the young respondents in person, but due to the COVID-19 pandemic this was deemed impossible. For the second stage of data collection, six of the participants who took the online survey were invited to participate in a focus group designed to grasp a better understanding of the results from the previous stage. The discovered findings uncover engaging gender similarities and differences in social media consumption and the type, subject, matter and style in which they posted their content, but also in regards to the performance of the self between the online and offline space.

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Empathy not quarantined: Association between people’s empathy to others and the COVID-19 pandemic situations based on a national survey study (Preprint)

10.2196/preprints.26834 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Zhibin Jiang ◽

Fan Yang ◽

Bu Zhong ◽

Xuebing Qin

Keyword(s):

Social Support ◽

Social Media ◽

National Survey ◽

Low Income ◽

Rural Areas ◽

Critical Role ◽

Affective Response ◽

Survey Study ◽

Income Levels ◽

The Social

BACKGROUND The Covid-19 pandemic had turned the world upside down, but not much is known about how people’s empathy might be affected by the pandemic. OBJECTIVE This study examined 1) how empathy towards others might be influenced by the social support people obtained by using social media; and 2) how the individual demographics (e.g., age, income) may affect empathy. METHODS A national survey (N = 943) was conducted in China in February 2020, in which the participants read three real scenarios about low-income urban workers (Scenario I), small business owners in cities (Scenario II), and farmers in rural areas (Scenario III) who underwent hardship due to COVID-19. After exposure to others’ difficulties in the scenarios, the participants’ empathy and anxiety levels were measured. We also measured the social support they had by using social media. RESULTS Results show that social support not only positively impacted empathy, β = .30, P < .001 for Scenario I, β = .30, P < .001 for Scenario II, and β = .29, P < .001 for Scenario III, but also interacted with anxiety in influencing the degree to which participants could maintain empathy towards others, β = .08, P = .010 for Scenario I, and β = .07, P = .033 for scenario II. Age negatively predicted empathy for Scenario I, β = -.08, P = .018 and Scenario III, β = -.08, P = .009, but not for Scenario II, β = -.03, P = .40. Income levels – low, medium, high – positively predicted empathy for Scenario III, F (2, 940) = 8.10, P < .001, but not for Scenario I, F (2, 940) = 2.14, P = .12, or Scenario II, F (2, 940) = 2.93, P = .06. Participants living in big cities expressed greater empathy towards others for Scenario III, F (2, 940) = 4.03, P =.018, but not for Scenario I, F (2, 940) = .81, P = .45, or Scenario II, F (2, 940) = 1.46, P =.23. CONCLUSIONS This study contributes to the literature by discovering the critical role empathy plays in people’s affective response to others during the pandemic. Anxiety did not decrease empathy. However, those gaining more social support on social media showed more empathy for others. Those who resided in cities with higher income levels were more empathetic during the COVID-19 outbreak. This study reveals that the social support people obtained helped maintain empathy to others, making them resilient in challenging times.

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Predicting Social Support Exchanging among Male Homosexuals Who are HIV-Positive in Social Media Context: The Role of Online Self-Disclosure

Journal of Homosexuality ◽

10.1080/00918369.2021.1935623 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 1-17

Author(s):

Yiwei Li ◽

Yu Guo ◽

Liang Chen

Keyword(s):

Social Support ◽

Social Media ◽

Hiv Positive ◽

Self Disclosure ◽

Male Homosexuals

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Where form meets function: the impact of social media platform characteristics on access to online social support

Universal Access in the Information Society ◽

10.1007/s10209-021-00810-6 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Jude P. Mikal

Keyword(s):

Social Support ◽

Social Media ◽

Online Social Support ◽

Social Media Platform ◽

Media Platform ◽

The Impact

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Steganographic visual story with mutual-perceived joint attention

EURASIP Journal on Image and Video Processing ◽

10.1186/s13640-020-00543-1 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 2021 (1) ◽

Author(s):

Yanyang Guo ◽

Hanzhou Wu ◽

Xinpeng Zhang

Keyword(s):

Social Support ◽

Social Media ◽

Deep Learning ◽

Joint Attention ◽

Online Social Networks ◽

Generation Model ◽

High Quality ◽

Visual Storytelling ◽

The Social ◽

User Intervention

AbstractSocial media plays an increasingly important role in providing information and social support to users. Due to the easy dissemination of content, as well as difficulty to track on the social network, we are motivated to study the way of concealing sensitive messages in this channel with high confidentiality. In this paper, we design a steganographic visual stories generation model that enables users to automatically post stego status on social media without any direct user intervention and use the mutual-perceived joint attention (MPJA) to maintain the imperceptibility of stego text. We demonstrate our approach on the visual storytelling (VIST) dataset and show that it yields high-quality steganographic texts. Since the proposed work realizes steganography by auto-generating visual story using deep learning, it enables us to move steganography to the real-world online social networks with intelligent steganographic bots.

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