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How Instagram profiles relate to political/social content use

A new study by The University of New Mexico identifies two different Instagram profiles and how they are associated with using Instagram to stay informed about political and social issues.

1. Lurkers: Passive, relatively quiet on Instagram, users tend to scroll and look at posts but do not engage or share opinions.
2. Reciprocal Communicators: Users tend to express opinions on Instagram and have high levels of motivation for information-seeking, entertainment, social interaction, and opinion expression.

Moonsun "Sunny" Choi, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Communication and Journalism, published the 2024 , "Identifying Instagram User Profiles: Who Uses Instagram to get Current Public Issues," to identify motivation-based profiles and how university students use Instagram to get political and public issues on the social media platform.

While she says many studies over the years have found the younger generation is not very interested in political issues and hesitant to express their opinions, this study says otherwise.

"College students still have motivation to express their thinking, like through Instagram. Previous studies say Instagram is not a political or public agenda space, but this study says no, it really could be," Choi said. "Many say Instagram is just for fun and entertainment, but we would like to argue that a certain group of the younger generation does share their own opinions on political and social issues on the platform, and we found that reciprocal communicators usually use Instagram to get political, social, and public issues."

According to the report, published in the Atlantic Journal of Communication, survey data were collected in 2020 from a sample of random respondents at The University of New Mexico. While Choi says she's not surprised by the types of profiles, she is surprised by their characteristics, citing the graph below. The study shows statistically significant mean differences between the two latent profiles for each motivation.

"If you see here, information seeking and social interaction go together in both profiles, moving in the same direction, which means they are looking for information while interacting with other people, which is not typical in the previous studies," she said. "The respondents of our study could understand that information seeking isn't limited to hard news but also includes soft news like information about restaurants or exhibitions, especially among university students."

Choi is a member of the Digital Media and Communication (DMC) Research Group, a team that studies how to communicate and interact with digital media about health and political issues. She hopes to graduate next spring with a Ph.D. from The University of New Mexico.