Published in

SAGE Publications, SAGE Open: Social Media + Society, 1(8), p. 205630512210862, 2022

DOI: 10.1177/20563051221086235

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Feeling authentic on social media: Subjective authenticity across Instagram Stories and Posts

Journal article published in 2021 by Rebekka Kreling, Adrian Meier, Leonard Reinecke ORCID
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.

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Preprint: archiving allowed
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Postprint: archiving allowed
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Published version: archiving allowed
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Abstract

Self-presentation on social network sites (SNS) such as Instagram is often assumed to be inauthentic or even fake. While authenticity on SNS has been linked to increased well-being, most research has investigated it either monolithically (e.g., via screen time measures) or with regard to stable self-presentations (e.g., in Facebook profiles). In contrast, this study compares subjective authenticity perceptions within users and between self-presentations via two SNS features—Stories vs Posts. Drawing on the affordances approach, we theorize and test whether and how Stories produce greater state authenticity than Posts. Results from a preregistered within-subjects study comparing self-reports on N = 489 Posts and N = 546 Stories from N = 202 Instagram users show that by allowing more spontaneous self-presentation, Stories indeed produced (slightly) higher authenticity perceptions than Posts. However, subjective authenticity was high in both features, indicating that they similarly offer a space for authentic online self-presentation.