Reflecting on Social Media Behavior by Structuring and Exploring Posts and Comments

Abstract

Social networks use several user interaction techniques for enabling and soliciting user responses, such as posts, likes and comments. Some of these triggers may lead to posts or comments that a user may regret at a later stage. In this article, we investigate how users may be supported in reflecting upon their past activities, making use of an exploratory spatial hypertext tool. We discuss how we transform raw Facebook data dumps into a graph-based structure and reflect upon design decisions. First results provide insights in users motivations for using such a tool and confirm that the approach helps them in discovering past activities that they perceive as outdated or even embarrassing.