Understanding How People Attend to and Engage with Foreign Language Posts in Multilingual Newsfeeds

Abstract

We explore how language affects people’s attention to and engagement with social media posts in an eye-tracking experiment in which participants viewed a mock newsfeed containing English and foreign language posts, half with and half without images. Participants spent less time looking at foreign language posts than English posts, and more time looking at posts with images than those without images. Participants reported being more likely to like or comment on posts in English and posts with images. We suggest some new design ideas for supporting people’s interaction on multilingual social media sites.