This article introduces the functional model of self‐disclosure on social network sites by integrating a functional theory of self‐disclosure and research on audience representations as situational cues for activating interpersonal goals. According to this model, people pursue strategic goals and disclose differently depending on social media affordances, and self‐disclosure goals mediate between media affordances and disclosure intimacy. The results of the empirical study examining self‐disclosure motivations and characteristics in Facebook status updates, wall posts, and private messaging lend support to this model and provide insights into the motivational drivers of self‐disclosure on SNSs, helping to reconcile traditional views on self‐disclosure and self‐disclosing behaviors in new media contexts.

This article extends socioemotional selectivity theory to online social networking by examining age differences in the size and composition of Facebook networks across a wide age range of Facebook users (18 to 93 years old) in a nationally representative sample. Findings suggest increasing selectivity of Facebook social partners with age. Compared to younger adults, friend networks of older adults are smaller but contain a greater proportion of individuals who are considered to be actual friends. Moreover, a higher proportion of actual to total Facebook friends is associated with lower levels of social isolation and loneliness across the life span.

The purpose of this study was to examine differences in self-disclosure goals, privacy concerns, and self-disclosure characteristics between Facebook and Twitter. These sites were compared in terms of audience representations, based on structural cues that suggest potential audiences for a user. We conceptualized audience representations in 2 ways: based on privacy boundaries that imply bounded versus unbounded audiences, and on network characteristics such as size and diversity for audiences within the boundary. Results revealed that self-disclosure goals, privacy concerns, and self-disclosure intimacy were different depending on the privacy boundary. Network characteristics were also important, but effects were moderated by the privacy boundary type, suggesting a complex interplay between the 2 types of audience representations in shaping self-disclosure in social media.

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The merging of audiences in social media and the variety of participation structures they present, including different audience sizes and interaction targets, pose questions about how people respond to these new communication situations. This research examined self-presentational and relational concerns through the analysis of language styles on Facebook. The authors collected a corpus of status updates, wall posts, and private messages from 79 participants. These messages varied in certain characteristics of language style, revealing differences in underlying self-presentational and relational concerns based on the publicness and directedness of the interaction. Positive emotion words correlated with self-reported self-presentational concerns in status updates, suggesting a strategic use of sharing positive emotions in public and nondirected communication via status updates. Verbal immediacy correlated with partner familiarity in wall posts but not in private messages, suggesting that verbal immediacy cues serve as markers to differentiate between more and less familiar partners in public wall posts.