Dancing with Ambiguity Online: When Our Online Actions Cause Confusion

Online social actions are often ambiguous, leading us to wonder: Why did this person unfollow me? Why did my friend like this negative content? Such ambiguity is common and perceived as a natural part of our ubiquitous online interactions. However, as online actions are curated and designed by platforms, this ambiguity is, at least in part, something platforms can control—for example, some platforms provide explicit dislike functionality, while others do not provide features to clearly signal such sentiment. Our understanding of this ambiguity around online actions is limited. We are unaware of the wide spectrum of situations in which people are confused by others’ online actions and how widespread such confusion might be. We conducted a survey study to identify when such ambiguity occurs—when people wonder why online actions are taken. We found that ambiguity of online actions occurs in non-nuanced situations. Specifically, some people wondered why online actions were taken when simply certain actions, content, or stakeholders were involved. For example, malicious content caused ambiguity, regardless of whether others posted or interacted with such content. Our findings suggest that more platform features may help to improve the clarity of people’s actions as well as the extent of the impact of these actions, which may help to avoid such uncertainty.