Interacting effects of political social media use, political discussion and political trust on civic engagement: Extending the differential gains model

Abstract

The differential gains model has lent credence to the fact that the positive association between news consumption and political engagement differs across people who discuss politics more often and those who do not. This study extends the original differential gains model by incorporating a second moderator, political trust, and replicating in three Asian societies: Japan, Taiwan, and Mainland China. In addition to the main associations, results lent partial support to the original hypothesis in the context of Japan. Moreover, a three-way interaction emerged in China Mainland. That is, among Chinese who have higher levels of political social media use, those who discuss politics more often and distrust political institutions showed higher levels of civic engagement. This study advances the original differential gains model into a moderated moderation model. Beyond the communicative factors, results revealed the importance of political trust in buffering media effects.

Understanding the “infodemic”: social media news use, homogeneous online discussion, self-perceived media literacy and misperceptions about COVID-19

“…Political discussion is deemed "the soul of democracy" (Yoo and Gil de Z uñiga, 2019, p. 3) because central to deliberative democracy is informed citizenry and free flow of information among citizens (Gil de Z uñiga et al, 2016;Su and Xiao, 2022). Decades of research have lent abundant evidence to the role of political discussion in affecting the political process, such as political participation and civic engagement (Gil de Z uñiga et al, 2016;Shah et al, 2017;Wilson et al, 2020).…”

Wired to seek, comment and share? Examining the relationship between personality, news consumption and misinformation engagement

“…Lawrence and Estow, 2017;Valenzuela et al, 2019). Information engagement, in general, has been widely while blindly embraced as a part of news processing conducive to the cultivation of informed citizens, free marketplace of ideas and deliberative democracies (Su and Xiao, 2021). However, Quandt (2018) criticized that such perspective is too "idealistic,.…”

“…Regardless of platforms, news use at large has been found to alter individuals' beliefs and behaviors (Afifi and Weiner, 2006). For instance, news use is found to promote current knowledge (Dimitrova et al, 2014), facilitate self-efficacy (Halpern et al, 2017), elicit interpersonal discussion (Su and Xiao, 2021) and trigger civic engagement (Diehl et al, 2019).…”

“…Information engagement, in general, has been widely while blindly embraced as a part of news processing conducive to the cultivation of informed citizens, free marketplace of ideas and deliberative democracies (Su and Xiao, 2021). However, Quandt (2018) criticized that such perspective is too “idealistic,…partially misguided, and naïve” (p. 44), because it intentionally ignored misinformation, which has been mounting in the social media arena.…”

“…, 2014), facilitate self-efficacy (Halpern et al. , 2017), elicit interpersonal discussion (Su and Xiao, 2021) and trigger civic engagement (Diehl et al. , 2019).…”