Platform Aesthetics and Relational-Risk Cues in Short-Form Relationship Advice

Author Accepted Manuscript This manuscript has undergone peer review and been accepted for publication. This is the author’s accepted version, preceding the publisher’s final typeset version of record. The journal citation and link to the version of record will be added when available. Purpose: This study examined whether familiar short-form presentation features distinguish relationship-advice posts that include literature-informed relational-risk cues from posts without them. Focus: The analysis addressed the specificity of five presentation categories and the contextual distinction between normalizing problematic behavior and warning against it. Methods: A qualitative-dominant secondary analysis used the existing five-pass qualitative multimedia coding of 100 public videos, evenly split between TikTok and Instagram Reels. Posts were classified as cue-positive when at least one of 10 operationally defined relational cues was present and cue-negative when none was present. Within-corpus comparisons used Mann–Whitney and Fisher exact tests, false-discovery-rate correction, and qualitative negative-case analysis. Results: Nineteen posts were cue-positive and 81 were cue-negative. Parasocial Proximity and Platform Normalization appeared in every post. Presentation-feature density and Advice Genre Framing did not differ significantly. Authority Framing was more common in cue-positive posts (84.2% vs. 46.9%; odds ratio = 6.04; adjusted q = .011), whereas Intimate Setting Cues were less common (47.4% vs. 87.7%; odds ratio = 0.13; q = .002). Negative cases showed that similar aesthetics also accompanied protective and boundary-supportive advice. These exploratory findings support examining relational content and the function of authority claims; they do not establish grooming, creator intent, audience effects, or validated risk indicators.