Motivations for Pandemic News Avoidance in Vietnam

The next paper in this IAMCR 2023 session is An Nguyen, with a focus on pandemic news avoidance on social media in Vietnam. A key aspect of this research project, therefore, is its focus on a non-democratic society: pandemic news avoidance has been studied in some detail already for western democracies and their saturated media environments, but the focus on Vietnam is new. How does news avoidance work here?

The project conducted some 21 face-to-face interviews with Vietnamese news users, with a focus on social news use and avoidance, and from these interviews developed a broader questionnaire which was promoted through Facebook ads during the COVID-19 pandemic and drew some 1,200 responses.

Key findings from the interviews are that news avoidance isn’t just related to metal health and well-being concerns: people were also concerned about unwanted consequences (e.g. from state surveillance of news discussions), negative impact on social status, exposure to negative emotions, and a lack of time and knowledge. Not all of these factors have been identified in previous, western studies of news avoidance.

In the survey, the perceived risks of incivility, unwanted arguments, tarnished reputation, broken relationships with family and friends, political insecurity, and the perceived pointlessness of online debate emerged as some of the strongest drivers of news avoidance. Information overload and well-being concerns were not prominent on this list, then – again this is different from typical western results. These patterns are especially pronounced for light Facebook news users: news avoidance tended to decrease for the most active Facebook news users.