Participation inequalities on Pinterest

Abstract

Digital inequality scholarship has highlighted the importance of sociodemographic factors and internet experiences in how people use digital media in their lives. Some of this research has focused specifically on the adoption and use of social media, but much of this work has only investigated text-based platforms. Image-based sites such as Pinterest have largely been ignored in work about online participation inequalities. It remains unclear how existing findings about participation inequalities on text-based social media translate to image-based platforms. The present paper fills this gap by exploring differences in user engagement on Pinterest, one of the most popular social media platforms. The paper uses a mixed methods approach and analyzes both survey and interview data. This approach allows for a deeper understanding of the pipeline of online participation inequalities, a digital inequalities framework introduced by Shaw and Hargittai (2018). The survey data reveal that age, gender and internet skills strongly relate to participation on the platform. The interviews add more nuance by providing insights into reasons and motivations for Pinterest use as well as reasons for dropping out of the pipeline, beyond those identified in the survey. This mixed-methods approach allows insights into how participation barriers apply to image-based social media.