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

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.