Profile Pictures Across Platforms: How Identity Visually Manifests Itself Among Social Media Accounts

Profile pictures are ubiquitous and salient parts of most online accounts and provide a window not only into individual users but also into the larger online community’s culture. Profile pictures have been called “one of the most telling pieces of self-disclosure or image construction” in online communities, and users face dizzying freedom when deciding on their selection. Such choices have been studied in discrete contexts, such as how personality type affects profile picture selection on Twitter, but they have not yet been studied across platforms to see how users stylize their representations to often distinct and segmented audiences. Informed by literature in internet studies, digital media, and visual sociology, this qualitative study offers a seminal look into how profile pictures differ across platforms and how user attributes and perceived audiences affect such decisions. It does so through personality assessments, visual analyses, and in-depth interviews. The findings reveal that the participants sampled in this study overwhelmingly prefer polychromatic images, and a majority prefer to have a unique picture on each platform. These same users are comfortable having their identifiable features in their profile pictures, and those who are more extroverted prefer to share the frame with someone else