K-Pop Fans’ Main and Priv Accounts: Impression Management, Searchability, and Imagined Surveillance on Twitter

Abstract

Social media provides a rich arena for self-presentation, aided by platform features that facilitate complex and nuanced impression management. This study explores the use of multiple SNS accounts by a single user as a means for impression management on Twitter. Members of the Korean pop (K-Pop) fan community use both a main (public) and priv (protected) account simultaneously. Through interview data and analysis via the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count software of a corpus of their tweets (605,066 words) on both accounts, this study finds significantly more negative emotion and tone language, as well as anger and anxiety, on the private accounts. Interviews suggest that fans engage in self-filtering and reserve contentious opinions for their private account due to community norms. Users express keen awareness of the searchable nature of tweets from their main account and fear that their negative tweets might be stumbled upon and sanctioned. Imagined surveillance as a result of the searchability of main account posts motivates users to hide posts on the priv account that could threaten their symbolic capital in the fan community. This contribution thus illustrates the enmeshed processes of searchability, imagined surveillance, and impression management on SNS.