Social Media and Me: How Community Identity Influences Click Speech

Abstract

Social media has become an integral part of our society. So did participation in social media communities. Click-speech, the simple expression of opinions via a click in the form of likes and shares, emerged as a dominant feature of various social media platforms. In this research, we investigate how social media users use click-speech within social media communities through the lens of community identity and how it shapes click-speech behavior. Using a scenario-based study, we show that community identity strongly influences click-speech to the point where content is liked and shared even when the community member disagrees with the post or content. We contextualize the construct of fear of isolation from the spiral of silence theory within identity theory. In this context, the fear of being isolated from the community is salient, and click-speech evolves from a function of endorsing content to a socially driven behavior of fitting in.