How Users' Perceptions of Friends' Content Influence Their "Annoyance" After Viewing Facebook Posts.

Abstract

Social media posts may elicit strong, instantaneous feelings of irritation, or "annoyance." The current experiment investigated how participants' ratings of Facebook posts and their levels of closeness to the poster impacted these feelings. Respondents (N = 476) were asked to rate how irrelevant, inappropriate, mundane, and annoying Facebook posts from an imagined close friend, moderately close friend, and acquaintance were. A cross-classified, Bayesian structural equation model determined the unique contributions at the rater level, target level, and the distinct combination of rater and target at the within level. At the within level, results suggested irrelevance, mundaneness, and inappropriateness of posts were positively associated with annoyance. At the rater level, we found participants who tended to rate all posts as being more inappropriate, spent more time on Facebook, and/or reported having more Facebook friends, tended to report greater annoyance. Finally, at the target level, participants rated acquaintances' posts as being more irrelevant and mundane relative to close friends. Contrary to expectations, posts from acquaintances did not appear to evoke more annoyance. Overall, a consistent finding between inappropriateness and annoyance emerged across all three levels such that inappropriate content posted to Facebook appeared to strongly elicit annoyance among users.