Platform-Based Uses and Gratifications in News-Sharing in Taiwan

The next session at the ICA 2024 conference is on news-sharing, and starts with Shu-Chu Sarrina Li, whose focus is on Facebook, Instagram, and Line in Taiwan. Social media are very popular in Taiwan – some 91% are regular Line users, 85% use Facebook, and 65% use Instagram, and half of all Taiwanese use some of these platforms to use and share news as well.

This paper approaches these practices through niche theory, which encourages scholars to explore media resource utilisation by identifying the breadth of the niches that such media address, and the overlap between the niches addressed by different media. Additionally, patterns in the use of social media for news can also be understood through a uses and gratifications approaches: gratifications from news sharing can be persuading, maintaining relationships, and image building, for instance.

This study conducted 22 intensive interviews as well as a representative online survey of 1,100 participants in Taiwan. It found that sharing news on Facebook has greater niche breadth and competitve superiority than sharing news on Line, probably because of Facebook’s more open interface for various types of information; viewing news on Facebook also had greater niche breadth, perhaps because of its greater variety of circulating news, while Line with its diverse groups of friendships supported information evaluation more directly.

Sharing news on Line supported relationship maintenance more successfully, then; this may also be related to the more specific friendship groups that can be created here. Meanwhile, Instagram was a distant third platform for news-sharing – however, sharing news here was somewhat useful for personal image-building, though Line was still preferred. On Facebook, strong risks to personal image from news-sharing were also identified, given the diverse friendship groups that people might have accumulated there.