Does social media keep me alarmed? The effects of expectations surrounding social media attributes and exposure to messages of social (in)stability on substitutive social media news use

abstract

Social media news is pervasively replacing traditional news outlets in people’s news diets. From an active-audience perspective, this study employed a factorial preregistered experiment with a pretest and mediators to examine how (1) low versus high expectations about social media’s potential to obtain information in an efficient way and (2) exposure to messages that trigger perceptions of social (in)stability influence Chinese young adults’ intentions to substitute social media for other news sources. This study found that participants who believed that social media as a news source could reduce information costs were more willing to substitute social media for other news sources and that participants who were primed with messages of social instability were less willing to do so. The two effects were mediated separately through reliance on different social media attributes: proximal cues and recommendation systems. Arguably, both attributes can contribute to reducing perceived information costs. Exposure to messages of social (in)stability also moderates the effect between expectations regarding attributes and reliance on recommendation systems and has implications for Schudson’s “monitorial citizen” model in the social media age.

Keywords:

• social media
• use and gratification
• China
• young adults
• news use behavior
• monitorial citizen

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Rachid Azrout for his helpful suggestions for the data analysis section. We also thank the two anonymous reviewers for their careful reading and their detailed suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential competing interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) with a VENI grant under project number: 016.Veni.195.123 (awarded to Mark Boukes).

Notes on contributors

Youjia Huang

Youjia Huang is a PhD candidate in Journalism & Communication at the School of Media & Communication (SMC), Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Her research interests include social media platforms and the effects of social media and algorithm news. E-mail: [e-mail]

Mark Boukes

Mark Boukes (PhD, 2015, at Universiteit van Amsterdam) is an Associate Professor in Communication Science at the Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR), University of Amsterdam. His research focuses on media content and media effects, in particular, regarding journalism, infotainment formats (e.g., narrative, soft news, political satire, talk shows), and economic news. E-mail: [email protected]