Intimacy between Actual Users and Virtual Agents: Interaction through likes and comments

Abstract

People share their photos with captions to interact with followers, and followers tap likes and leave comments on the posts. These activities are significant to build relationships and networks between people on Instagram. Numerous researches on human-human interaction on social media have been done for a long time, but communications with the virtual agent based on computer-generated lead new research questions to the field of human-computer interaction. We crawled quantitative data from three virtual agents accounts on Instagram to analyze the phenomenon that actual users on social media want to interact and engage with virtual agents. The purpose of our work is to find out how the number of likes and comments are associated with photography and caption. Throughout the quantitative works, we found out that people have tendencies to leave more likes and comments on the post where virtual agents express their emotions. We conclude that emotion and relationship between virtual agents themselves stir up strong interest actual users on social media. © 2020 IEEE.