Reasons for News-Sharing Avoidance amongst Canadian Social Media Users

The final speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Ori Tenenboim, whose interest is in why news users limit their public expression online. This might be driven by perceptions of the visibility of their news engagement, and of the consequences that such visibility may have.

News engagement plays a crucial role in democratic life, and plays a role in what people see and engage with; if users self-censor such engagement then this also affects what other people see in their digital media spaces. Non-engagement may also relate to relationship management, and be affected by users’ privacy calculus about their private and public engagement decisions. Such decisions may not be entirely conscious, but users do have agency in these choices.

Ori conducted interviews with 50 users in Canada, and found various strategies: lower expression volume (less activity), more private expression spaces, and more closed-ended expression types (e.g. likes rather than comments). Reasons for such choices include protection from negative and potentially harmful experiences at personal or professional levels; a sense of the pointlessness of such engagement, incorporating cost/benefit calculations and concerns about amplifying falsehoods; underlying personality traits like conflict avoidance; and perceptions of particularity that led users to share news only with specific communication partners who they believed to be especially interested in such content.

Building on interviews, this study did not examine actual behaviours, but provides useful insights into the motivators for such behaviours. Findings on pointlessness and protection questions might also be useful in the further design of relevant platforms, in order to minimise such perceptions.