Experts and users studies

Social networks harness the power of persuasive technology to increase user engagement. However, these persuasive strategies have raised concerns about whether these platforms are intentionally exploiting persuasion to influence users to perform tasks they are unaware of or lack a clear understanding of. These strategies have come under scrutiny within the field of dark patterns, where research aims to uncover the different types of dark patterns and identify them in order to protect the user’s well being. The primary objective of our research is to gain a comprehensive understanding of the core principles of persuasion within social networking sites. This understanding is crucial for identifying potentially malicious concepts, thus providing a foundation for addressing manipulative and abusive use of persuasive technology. This paper focuses on examining the persuasive concepts on TikTok and their alignment with Mathur’s dark pattern characteristics, as well as providing a categorization based on the persuasion degree. Additionally, this paper aims to gain insights into how users perceive these problematic persuasion tactics. In our experts study findings, we identified a group of six concepts exhibiting manipulative forms of persuasion and an extensive application of the dark pattern characteristic ”asymmetry”. However, our user study findings indicate that while experts evaluated these six concepts as manipulative, users perceived them only as persuasive.