Paper Info
Title
Understanding Social Media Disclosures of Sexual Abuse Through the Lenses of Support Seeking and Anonymity.
Abstract
Support seeking in stigmatized contexts is useful when the discloser receives the desired response, but it also entails social risks. Thus, people do not always disclose or seek support when they need it. One such stigmatized context for support seeking is sexual abuse. In this paper, we use mixed methods to understand abuse-related posts on reddit. First, we take a qualitative approach to understand post content. Then we use quantitative methods to investigate the use of "throwaway" accounts, which provide greater anonymity, and report on factors associated with support seeking and first-time disclosures. In addition to significant linguistic differences between throwaway and identified accounts, we find that those using throwaway accounts are significantly more likely to engage in seeking support. We also find that men are significantly more likely to use throwaway accounts when posting about sexual abuse. Results suggest that subreddit moderators and members who wish to provide support pay attention to throwaway accounts, and we discuss the importance of context-specific anonymity in support seeking.
Year
DOI
Venue
2016
10.1145/2858036.2858096
CHI
Keywords
Field
DocType
Identity, reddit, self-disclosure, sexual abuse, social media, well-being, social support, stigma, anonymity, throwaway
Social psychology,Social media,Wish,Computer science,Human–computer interaction,Well-being,Self-disclosure,Anonymity,Social support,Stigma (botany)
Conference
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
978-1-4503-3362-7
36
1.57
References 
Authors
17
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Nazanin Andalibi112516.28
Oliver L. Haimson217718.01
Munmun De Choudhury31864123.30
Andrea Forte423221.48