The next speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Jiyoun Suk. Her interest is in whether engagement metrics on social media actually measure attention: the average engagement rate across the major platforms is below 2%; in the US, for instance, some 70% never post or comment about political or social issues. So do attention and engagement actually align, and under what conditions – and what does this mean for what we can draw from the data we have?
We can expect a gap between attention and engagement because engagement requires crossing an activity threshold that attention does not. Engagement is also often publicly visible to other users, which further raises the stakes of any visible action, and such engagement also carries reputational and relational risks.
This project explored this using the Truman simulated social media platform. It worked with some 1,000 participants who saw artificially created political and non-political social media feeds; these were variously presented as engagement-based, reverse-chronological, and random feeds. In each case, they could interact with these feeds as they would using standard social media platforms.
This showed that attention and engagement were weakly coupled. In fact, even as viewing time increases, attention rarely turns into engagement action. Political posts were 67% less likely to receive a like than non-political posts, and 59% less likely to receive a comment. Feed curation had no impact on these patterns, however; only the content domain affects the likelihood of engagement – feed curation affects what users see, but not how and when they choose to engage with this content.
Further, this also means that sampling metrics affect findings: attention and engagement patterns for posts differ substantially, meaning that a focus on one over the other will highlight a very different set of key posts which might be analysed in more detail in subsequent research steps. This is especially important to keep in mind for platforms which do not actually provide attention (e.g. views) datapoints, and only offer engagement data.
