The value affordances of social media engagement features

Abstract Social media engagement is ubiquitous but contested, simultaneously framed as an everyday form of support and an urgent societal risk. To make sense of these competing claims, we introduce the concept of value affordances, defined as the set of ethical, aesthetic, and relational principles that emerge from the interaction between different stakeholders and technological infrastructures. We develop a novel method involving focus groups and value cards to study the value affordances of engagement features and explore how international students attribute values to the Like, Comment, and Share buttons of TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. Across platforms, participants agree that engagement features promote expression, care, and community and hinder privacy, mindfulness, peace, and safety. We discuss how our participants navigate value tradeoffs, emphasizing individual agency over structural factors when evaluating the design of platforms, using social media creatively, and assigning responsibility for harm to other users.