Shinrea Su

Existing studies of identity signaling have built support for the notion of a persona, upon which individuals choose to expand in the direction of depth or breadth. With the growing dependency of society on online environments, this structure of identity construction can be observed on social media in addition to in real life. On platforms such as Twitter, a variety of tools can be utilized to construct one’s persona. In this paper, we aimed to assess the role of two main Twitter functions, Retweet and like, in identity construction, with our focus on the use of these tools to expand breadth and depth. With Twitter data, we used a topic modeling approach to evaluate the use of each tool in expanding the breadth or depth of information existing in user profiles. Our results neither strongly supported nor rejected our hypothesis that likes would be used to expand the depth of users’ personas, which underscores the need for further research of Twitter likes and Retweets in the realm of identity construction.