Highlights
Users with a high level of eHealth literacy are more likely to share positive health articles when they have extreme confirmation bias.
Users with a high level of eHealth literacy are more likely to share negative health articles when they have moderate confirmation bias or no confirmation bias.
Users with a low level of eHealth literacy are more likely to share health articles regardless of positive or negative content valence when they have moderate positive confirmation bias.
Purpose
As an increasing number of users have acquired information across the web and mobile platforms for social question and answering (Q&A), it is of interest to explore whether there are differences in social Q&A usages between the two platforms. The purpose of this paper is to compare web and mobile platforms of a social Q&A service from the user’s perspective in terms of three dimensions, namely, demographics, individual-based constructs, and information-based constructs.
Design/methodology/approach
Because Zhihu.com is one of the most popular social Q&A sites in China, the authors used online questionnaires to investigate its users’ perceptions of these three dimensions. From January to March 2016, the authors obtained 278 valid responses in total through snowball and convenient sampling. Collected data are analyzed through descriptive statistics and inferential statistics.
Findings
The results indicate that there exist significant differences between web users and mobile users on Zhihu.com in terms of gender, affinity, and information seeking. More specifically, compared to the male users, more female users rely on the mobile platform to access the information service; mobile users perceive higher affinity with Zhihu.com than web users; and mobile users perceive higher information-seeking intention than web users do.
Originality/value
Regarding the theoretical aspect, this study proposes a conceptual framework for comparison between the web and mobile platforms of social Q&A from the user’s perspective. Regarding the practical aspect, the comparative results of this study could give social Q&A service providers useful information about users’ differences between web and mobile platforms of social Q&A services.
This paper seeks to depict online rumor retransmission using three main constructs, namely, message characteristics, user characteristics and retransmission outcomes. In particular, it teases retransmission outcomes into volume, immediacy and lifespan of rumor tweets. The dataset was drawn from 322 original Twitter messages which generated some 5,700 retweets about the rumored death of Lee Kuan Yew (LKY). Content analysis and statistical tests were conducted. The results confirm the robustness of the research model. Specifically, rumor message characteristics affect retransmission in terms of volume, immediacy and lifespan. Additionally, user characteristics are positively related to volume and immediacy. Finally, user characteristics have a moderating effect on the relationships between rumor message characteristics and retransmission outcomes. This paper illustrates the applicability of the information diffusion model on online rumor retransmission which hitherto has yet to be attempted. Moreover, it granularizes the concept of online rumor retransmission into three important outcomes, namely, volume, immediacy and lifespan. On the practical front, this paper has implications for organizations seeking to combat rumors.
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