A Study On The Psychology And Behavior Of Users’ Social Media Fatigue During The COVID-19

The outbreak of the COVID-19,a major public health event at the end of 2019,has posed a huge threat and challenge to the lives and health,daily life and work of people at home and abroad.With the passage of time,thanks to the effective leadership of the government and the active cooperation of the people,we have overcome the difficulties time after time and achieved remarkable results in the fight against the epidemic.However,with the normalization of epidemic prevention and control,in the post-epidemic era,the effectiveness of social media platforms in transmitting epidemic information and the mental health of the public deserve our attention.During the COVID-19 pandemic,social media has become an important source of information for the public to learn about the progress of the epidemic,the effectiveness of the fight against the epidemic,people’s livelihood and health knowledge.However,when the overwhelming and difficult information on social media platforms exceeds the cognitive ability and processing range of users,will it cause social media fatigue of users and bring negative results? In the context of COVID-19,how the external social media platforms and users’ individual psychological traits influence users’ social media fatigue and information avoidance behavior?Based on this,this study adopts the Cognitive Load Theory and Affective Load Theory,and uses questionnaire as the main method and in-depth interview as the auxiliary method.From the perspective of external factors such as epidemic information overload,low-quality information perception,and internal factors such as user optimism,self-efficacy and missing anxiety,this paper studies the influence of public social media fatigue and information avoidance behavior.It is found that information overload and low-quality information perception have significant positive correlation with social media fatigue,optimism and self-efficiency has significant negative correlation with social media fatigue,and missing anxiety has significant positive correlation with social media fatigue.Social media fatigue plays a significant mediating role in the influence of their variables on information avoidance behavior.In addition,through the in-depth interview,it is known that different social media platforms have different information perception at the user side during the epidemic period.Microblog and We Chat group are the main platforms for information overload and the breeding of false information.From the level of the event itself,the suddenness,crisis and destructiveness of the COVID-19 as a public health event are decreasing with the passage of time,and the public is more likely to feel fatigue due to the repetition,homogeneity and low quality of information on social media platforms.From the level of public psychological perception,social media will magnify users’ negative emotions,resulting in psychological burnout and information avoidance behavior.This study places the research on social media fatigue in the context of COVID-19,broadens the research scenarios,influencing factors and resulting behaviors of social media fatigue,and helps to bring some thoughts to media information transmission and public information processing under COVID-19.