The Post Behind Anonymity: A Thematic Discourse Analysis of Facebook Posts from Confession Pages in different Universities in the Philippines

Abstract

Facebook confession pages have become a popular platform in numerous universities in the Philippines, enabling college students to share experiences, thoughts, and emotions anonymously. However, the vast content on these pages makes understanding the underlying themes and patterns in the posts challenging. This study collected textual contents from the Facebook confession pages of (14) local universities in the Philippines from 2018-2022 using Scrapestorm. After collection and undergoing several preprocessing techniques, Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), a topic modeling algorithm, was applied to analyze the themes in the collected dataset. The results of the analysis revealed (2) general topics related to the social relationships and personal experiences of college students. On the other hand, (5) underlying topics were discussed in the discourses and posts from the confession pages including: ’confessing vulnerabilities, ’ranting about daily struggles’, ’opinions on political events’, ’sharing success stories’, and even ’sharing sensitive topics’. Also, the analysis revealed (5) terminologies that frequently co-occurred together, such as ’shout-out’, ’crush kita’, ’wanna-say’, ’mental-health’, and ’face-face’, which depict different topic discourses of college students in the Philippines.