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Social media have become an increasingly important source for people to learn about politics and public affairs. The purpose of this study is to investigate the role of social media news sharing as a reasoning process of the O-S-R-O-R model and the moderation role of social media news performance on the association between news consumption and attitudinal changes.

A national survey was conducted in the US. The researcher recruited participants in the Qualtrics national panel by following the census adult demographic breakdown.

This study finds that social media news consumption on the US-China trade conflict is likely to lead Americans to change attitudes toward Chinese, and this relationship is mediated by social media news sharing. In addition, the indirect relationship via news sharing is found particularly strong among individuals who perceive social media news fair and balanced.

This study extends the literature by examining social media news engagement on the ongoing trade conflict between the US and China. It reveals that the impact of social media news consumption on people's attitudinal and behavioral changes depends on people's perceived news quality on these platforms. Theoretical contribution to the O-S-R-O-R model and practical implications to social media news are discussed in terms of the role that social media platforms play in attitude change.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-05-2020-0178

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the process by which social media news use leads individuals to engage in attempted political persuasion, examining the mediating roles of cognitive elaboration, political knowledge, political efficacy and political interest.

The study relies on a nationally representative two-wave online survey collected before the 2016 US Presidential Election. Serial mediation is tested using the PROCESS macro.

The study finds significant indirect effects of social media news use on political persuasion via cognitive elaboration, political knowledge, political efficacy and political interest.

Causal inferences should be made with caution. While the measurement of cognitive elaboration is based on prior literature, it is a complex mental process that could be measured more directly in future research.

The findings imply that social media news use contributes to a potentially discursive environment in which cross-cutting views may drive argumentation. Thus, the study sheds light on how social media contribute to persuasive political conversation.

The study applies the O-S-R-O-R model to political persuasion and highlights the processes of reflection, understanding and elaboration that convert news use into attempted persuasion.

The ballooning health misinformation on social media raises grave concerns. Drawing upon the S-O-R (Stimulus-Organism-Response) model and the information processing literature, this study aims to explore (1) how social media health information seeking (S) affects health misinformation sharing intention (R) through the channel of health misperceptions (O) and (2) whether the mediation process would be contingent upon different information processing predispositions.

Data were collected from a survey comprising 388 respondents from the Chinese middle-aged or above group, one of China's most susceptible populations to health misinformation. Standard multiple linear regression models and the PROCESS Macro were adopted to examine the direct effect and the moderated mediation model.

Results bolstered the S-O-R-based mechanism, in which health misperceptions mediated social media health information seeking's effect on health misinformation sharing intention. As an indicator of analytical information processing, need for cognition (NFC) failed to moderate the mediation process. Contrarily, faith in intuition (FI), an indicator reflecting intuitive information processing, served as a significant moderator. The positive association between social media health information seeking and misperceptions was stronger among respondents with low FI.

This study sheds light on health misinformation sharing research by bridging health information seeking, information internalization and information sharing. Moreover, the authors extended the S-O-R model by integrating information processing predispositions, which differs this study from previous literature and advances the extant understanding of how information processing styles work in the face of online health misinformation. The particular age group and the Chinese context further inform context-specific implications regarding online health misinformation regulation.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-04-2023-0157.

In the current media landscape where misinformation circulation becomes a primary threat to public health and society's intellectual well-being, incidental news exposure's role in influencing misperceptions and misinformation engagement remains under-explored. Moreover, less is known regarding how and to what extent personal factors such as personality and media literacy may drive the sharing of misinformation.

Under the theoretical guidance of the stimulus-organism-response (S-O-R) model, the authors surveyed 546 college students aged 18 and above to explore the relationship between incidental news exposure and misinformation sharing.

Findings buttressed the hypothesized relationship built on the S-O-R model and revealed a path from incidental online news exposure to misinformation sharing, mediated by misperceptions. The mediated path was further moderated by narcissism and media literacy. Specifically, narcissists have higher misperceptions when they encounter online news more often; higher misperceptions in turn give rise to greater misinformation sharing behaviors. The ability to critically consume new media information only decreases misinformation sharing behavior for narcissists with lower misperceptions.

Guided by the S-O-R framework, this study takes the first step in examining the link between incidental news exposure and misinformation sharing and accounts for the moderating influences of personality and media literacy factors. Findings provide a theoretical foundation and practical implications for future interventions to combat misinformation.

The purpose of this study is to determine the beliefs that influence university students to use social networking sites (SNS) for expressive participation in social movements.

The original technology acceptance model (TAM), a quantitative methodological approach, and a survey were used to collect responses from 214 university students in Spain. Structural equation modelling was used to test the proposed relationships.

Results confirm that the perceived ease of use (PEU) and perceived usefulness (PU) of SNS significantly affect a student's intention to use SNS for expressive social participation in social movements, with use intention significantly affecting actual participation. There was no significant moderating effect of students' gender on these relationships.

Although there is much discussion in the popular press about how people use SNS, there is no published empirical research on the determinants that contribute to a person's intention to use and actual use of SNS in the context of social movements. This paper is one of the first studies to investigate young people's perception of the SNS usefulness and ease of the use for participation in social movements.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how the intensity use of WeChat is associated with perceived social capital and psychological well-being factors among Chinese international students in Germany.

Based on an online survey data collected from 212 Chinese international college students in Germany, correlation analysis and structural equation modeling were sequentially implemented to deal with the research questions.

The correlation analysis results indicate that the intensity of WeChat use is positively correlated with bridging, bonding, and maintained social capital. Additionally, a path model demonstrates that bonding social capital is positively related to life satisfaction and negatively related to the sense of loneliness. Furthermore, both bonding and maintained social capital mediate the relationship between WeChat use and these two well-being outcomes.

Theoretically, the research is an initial study contributing to the existing social media literature on evaluating the effects of WeChat use on social capital and well-being. Practically, these obtained results can be beneficial to the understanding the dynamics of how social media may potentially impact students’ social connectedness and life quality.

Although WeChat has become the most prevalent social networking site in Mainland China, the social and psychological implications of the emerging technology are not completely understood. The paper offers evidence that WeChat has functioned as an efficient platform for sojourners to develop diverse types of social capital and promote well-being in an intercultural setting.

Employing the cognitive mediation model, the study aims to examine a moderated-mediation mechanism of social media news use contingent upon elaboration on political knowledge through fact-checking – specifically, the interaction effect of social media news with elaboration on fact-checking.

The moderated-mediation model is tested using panel survey data collected during the 2016 USA presidential election (N = 1,624 at Wave 1; N = 637 at Wave 2).

The findings reveal that social media news users are frequent visitors of fact-checking websites. Results also suggest that those with increased social media news use and cognitive elaboration on news content are more likely to visit fact-checking sites, which contributes to increased political knowledge.

The results of the current study, especially in the era of social media environment where various information is overflowing, suggest an important role of individuals' responsibility as democratic citizens given that people's cognitive elaboration and surveillance efforts, which tries to think about important public issues they consume through media, could strengthen a positive pathway toward informed citizens.

This study examines the direct and indirect effect mechanisms of how using smartphones for social media is associated with college students' civic engagement via levels of communication network heterogeneity and social capital. In addition, this study tests whether such indirect effects mechanisms are moderated by the need to belong.

The study analyzes data from an online survey (N = 580) conducted at a public university. The PROCESS macro is used to examine the mediation association between mobile social media use, communication network heterogeneity, social capital, and civic engagement and the moderated mediation conditional upon need to belong.

College students who often use smartphones for social media were more likely to communicate with people who have different socio-demographic characteristics and different opinions. There was also a positive mediation mechanism between smartphone use for social media, network heterogeneity, social capital and civic engagement, which means that college students who often use mobile social media are more likely to communicate with heterogeneous others and develop a sense of social capital, which in turn led to greater levels of civic engagement. Importantly, these indirect effects of smartphone use for social media on civic engagement were stronger for those with greater levels of need to belong.

The findings of the current study are significant given that little is known about how young adults' mobile social media use is associated with communication network heterogeneity and civic engagement in their everyday life. The research expands the research agenda by investigating the most popular interactive communication media platforms.

Early information technology scholarship centered on the internet’s potential to be a democratizing force was often framed using an equalization/normalization lens arguing that either the internet was going to be an equalizing force bringing power to the masses, or it was going to be normalized into the existing power structure. The purpose of this paper is to argue that considered over time the equalization/normalization lens still sheds light on our understanding of how social media (SM) strategy can shape electoral success asking if SM are an equalizing force balancing the resource gap between candidates or are being normalized into the modern campaign.

SM metrics and electoral data were collected for US congressional candidates in 2012 and 2016. A series of additive and interactive models are employed to test whether the effects of SM reach on electoral success are conditional on levels of campaign spending.

The results suggest that those candidates who spend more actually get more utility for their SM campaign than those who spend less in 2012. However, by 2016, spending inversely correlates with SM campaign utility.

The findings indicate that SM appeared to be normalizing into the modern congressional campaign in 2012. However, with higher rates of penetration and greater levels of usage in 2016, the SM campaign utility was not a result of higher spending. SM may be a greater equalizing force now.

Campaigns that initially integrate digital and traditional strategies increase the effectiveness of the SM campaign because the non-digital strategy both complements and draws attention to the SM campaign. However, by 2016 the SM campaign was not driven by its relation to traditional campaign spending.

This is the first large N study to examine the interactive effects of SM reach and campaign spending on electoral success.

The primary goal of this article is to review the existing studies and offer clarity regarding the association between social media adoption and youth civic engagement.

This research systematically summarizes and reviews 42 original articles published from 2010 to 2019 with an objective of offering insightful results. Additionally, a theoretical framework was carefully designed by adopting various conceptions from citizen participation and computer-mediated communication research literature.

The findings demonstrate that social media usage could generally have a positive correlation with civic participation among younger generations. Moreover, the result also highlights that certain functional features of social media uses including using social media for news consumption and expression could significantly predict civic engagement.

Despite the ever-growing importance of social media technologies, investigations on their differential, nonlinear and even inconsistent effects on civic engagement remain theoretically ambiguous and empirically unsubstantiated. The study represents one of the first scholarly attempts to review, summarize and analyze the extant research evidence from the past ten years.