A point in the Dennen, et al. (2020) article that I found very interesting discussed the difficulty in determining the intent of acknowledgments on social media. As the authors state: "Distinguishing among users who click on these indicators to say “I saw this,” “I like this,” and “I want to save this so I can find it later,” can be difficult if there are not corresponding linguistic cues in a comment that explain the user’s intent" (Dennen, et al., 2020). I'll bet we've all come across this issue at some point in our social media journeys. Some social media sites have addressed this issue by adding a wider range of emoticons that allow a wider variety of expressions than simply 'like' or 'not like.' 

Facebook, for instance, allows for more expression these days, but Twitter only allows one option for those that prefer non-textual acknowledgments. So, when someone tweets something understood to be negative or upsetting, the only non-verbal option would be to 'like' that comment - though as the authors note in reference to sharing, 'liking' something without verbal indicators could distort the intent of the 'like.' This might not be the case when two people know each other and the preexisting relationship implies intent, but without that essential context, it could be tricky.

Dennen, V. P., Word, K., Adolfson, D., Arechavaleta, V., He, D., Hsu, C.-W., Hur, J., Jung, D., Kent, H., Russell, A., & Toth, K. (2020). Using the networked knowledge activities framework to examine learning on social networking sites. In P. Kommers & G. C. Peng (Eds.), Proceedings of the international conference on Web-based Communities and Social Media 2020 (pp. 165-172). IADIS Press. 

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