Understanding the Time-Limited Privacy Settings on WeChat Moments: A Text Mining Approach

The digital data permanence makes users’ posted content persistent on social networking services (SNSs), which may cause negative consequences. As such, some SNS platforms provide users with new features to manage their past content. Particularly, WeChat Moments as the most popular SNS platform in China launches the time-limited privacy settings allowing users to set an expiration date for their posts. Our work explores what factors influencing the use of time-limited privacy settings. We conduct text mining with latent dirichlet allocation (LDA) model on 59,256 relevant microblogs regarding these settings, and the LDA identifies 9 topics contributing to 6 dimensions. The results show that audience management, mystery, emotional state, use intensity of other SNSs, peer influence, and life changes are possible factors for using the time-limited privacy settings on WeChat Moments. Our findings could provide framework to further studies, and inspire providers to design more effective features on SNSs