The Political Effects Of Social Media Use

The development of social media in China,has not only expanded the range of public opinion in breadth and depth,but also significantly changed the way in which people are engaged in politics.More importantly,the combination of a government-controlled mainstream media and a relatively free social media provides a unique opportunity to test the political effects of social media use.At the same time,the basic role of psychological characteristics in political effects has not received enough attention.Therefore,this study introduces "Need for Orientation"(NFO)—the most prominent of the contingent conditions for agenda-setting effects—as a starting point of research focusing on the psychological factors of media effects,to provide new ideas and perspectives for understanding the relationships between social media use and political life.This research explores the political effects of social media use from three aspects:political knowledge,political efficacy and political participation,which are the three indicators of citizen engagement,namely,the value perception,belief judgment and action trends that citizens have or should have.Based on such content,this study goes beyond the same effects in the general state,and adopts NFO as a moderator to analyze the different effects of social media use from the psychological perspective,with a goal to illustrate the generalization and differentiation of the influence of social media in the process of reconstructing politics.Combined with the perspectives of communication,political science and psychology,a total sample of 1,058 Chinese Internet users were surveyed.This study identifies three basic sets of predictors of citizen engagement:(1)knowledge possession and knowledge production,(2)internal efficacy,external efficacy and collective efficacy,and(3)online political participation and offline political participation.The paper finally constructs the theoretical model,which social media use and its effects on citizen engagement,and the above relationships are moderated by NFO.The main results are as follows.First,social media has the potential to facilitate citizen engagement in China.Results show that social media use is positively related to all dimensions of citizen engagement,with the exception of external efficacy.Moreover,political knowledge and political efficacy can both better predict online political participation than offline political participation,which suggests that social media use can directly boost political knowledge,political efficacy and political participation,but also indirectly affect political participation by influencing political knowledge and political efficacy.Therefore,social media shows a positive relationships with China's political process from the three aspects of knowledge,efficacy and behavior,which has technological empowerment and democratic potential,presenting new opportunities to construct a participatory public sphere.In the near future,social media may bring further possibilities for strengthening democratic politics and promoting society transition.Second,there are structural inequalities in the political effects of social media use.(1)All dimensions of citizen engagement directly correspond to the distribution of individual economic,material and educational resources,which is the extension of the existing social power distribution structure.(2)The usage gap between individuals with different socio-economic status is greater for the social media than for traditional media and news websites.More importantly,the greater usage gap on the social media is also associated with a bigger knowledge gap.(3)China's Internet users have a lower level of external efficacy than internal and collective efficacy.Furthermore,social media use is negatively related to external efficacy for people with low and high NFO.(4)The overall levels of political participation are very low and unequal,for the level of online political participation is higher than that of offline political participation,and the political behaviors that need more resources have significantly lower proportion.Third,different patterns and types of social media use have different political effects.This study does not treat social media as a single unit,but as an analysis object with different characteristics.On the one hand,different patterns of social media use deserve our attention.Information production can better predict collective efficacy and online political participation than information possession.Social activity is a better predictor of internal efficacy,external efficacy and offline political participation than recreational activity.Political knowledge is positively related to information possession,while negatively related to social activity.On the other hand,different types of social media deserve our attention.Blogs have a stronger positive relationship with three types of political efficacy and offline political participation.Microblog has a stronger positive effect on knowledge possession,knowledge production and online political participation.But marriage&dating social media has negative impact on knowledge possession and external efficacy.Fourth,the relationships between social media use and citizen engagement are moderated by NFO.On the one hand,NFO has a significant main effect on all dimensions of citizen engagement,and people with moderate NFO are at the highest levels of political knowledge,efficacy and participation.On the other hand,NFO has a moderating effect on the political effects of social media use.With the increase in social media use,(1)people with high NFO have the fastest increase in knowledge production;(2)people with moderate NFO have the fastest increase in internal and collective efficacy,while people with low NFO have the fastest decrease in external efficacy;and(3)people with low NFO have the fastest increase in offline political participation.This research not only provides a psychological explanation for the individual differences in the political effects of social media use,but also finds out the nonlinear effect of NFO in Chinese social context,providing new empirical data and theoretical implications in the new media environment and new social context.