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1 INTRUDUCTION

Social media today is the biggest and arguably the most powerful communication tool that we

use. Since the development of social media, it opened up a lot of opportunities and developments in

our community and society, from social media marketing, information dissemination, to a platform

for emotional and social development. With Facebook being the most popular social media platform

all over the globe, with 2.27 billion active users, we can’t deny the big contribution of it in our

society. According to Elsevier (2017) Facebook fosters youth development especially in civic

engagement, Facebook also enhances the users’ self-representation, self-expression and the users’

participation in social discourse ( Thorkildsen and Xing, 2016).

Recently the London-based consultancy “We Are Social” reported that the Filipinos is the second

among other race to spend most of their time using social media, only next to Thailand, spending an

average of nine (9) hours and twenty-nine (29) minutes a day. It is said also in the report that there

67 million accounts in the Philippines and 10 million Instagram user. With this statistics we could say

that Facebook is a big part in every Filipinos life, since it is our fastest means of communication and

source of information, Facebook was also able to foster the self-confidence and talents of the

Filipinos because there are a lot of Facebook influencer, commentator and personality that comes

from our country which pioneered their careers on Facebook.

In our local community Facebook has its role in our everyday living , it serves as a venue for

business, learning, communication, civic engagement and most of all the it serves as a venue for the

self-expression of our people. And it’s very evident, you can see a young girl as young as 8 years old

using Facebook and also you can see a 70 years old woman having their statuses updated.
 In some cases students experience some constraints in their self-expression on Facebook varying

from technical constraints to social constraints depending on the situation, and that is what this

study is all about. This study aims to elicit the constraints that students may experience in

expressing themselves in Facebook. What are their disposition in self-expression through Facebook

and how does constraints affect them. At the end of this study when we were able to identify

specific constraints – as an output to these we would like to find solution in addressing these

constraints so that students could express themselves on Facebook at their very honest and

personal viewpoint.