This presentation is a salient part of the research on social news uses and gratifications in Vietnam. Twenty-one people from different groups of age, location and educational level have been interviewed. While the research originally aimed to investigate how and why Vietnamese audiences use social news, data indicated that social news avoidance was emerging significantly.
The literature of this topic is still in its infancy. More noticeably, it tends to investigate the avoidance of news consumption only rather than including the avoidance of news distribution and production. This fact creates a need for examining social news avoidance in different contexts, especially in developing countries such as Vietnam. Exploring the specific behaviours towards social news avoidance - in the act of not only avoiding news consumption but also avoiding news distribution and avoiding news production - is required.
Findings show that participants (1) have actively discovered various ways to avoid social news recommendations produced by both algorithms and humans. On social media platforms, they (2) aggressively avoided expressing opinions directly but occasionally reported current events. Some of the participants held very strong opinions on either fake news or controversial news, but as opposed to going to social media, they (3) mostly went offline to express and discuss these points further. Interestingly, a small number of participants stated that (4) if they had encountered a newsworthy event and reported it, they would have published on mainstream media rather than on social media.
Investigating the motivations behind these behaviours became the next purpose of this research and 19 motivations have been figured out. While the current literature shows that news avoidance is often associated with news overload (Park, 2019; Schmitt, Debbelt, & Scheider, 2018), the most common motivations found out in our research related to participants' habits and their limited time budget. Additionally, the more negative experiences the participants had had before, the more aggressively they avoided social news activities. Also, the belief that their social news use was unnecessary and the socio-political factors of Vietnam both played significant roles in participants’ social news avoidance.
This qualitative research primarily revealed patterns of social news avoidance in Vietnam. They have become indicators for a large-scale survey which we plan to do in the next three months. The results from this current research and the planned quantitative research will help generalise for the population of Vietnam and enrich the overall perspectives on the topic of news avoidance.
Keywords
Social media, social news, news avoidance, social news avoidance
References
Park, C. S. (2019). Does Too Much News on Social Media Discourage News Seeking? Mediating Role of News Efficacy Between Perceived News Overload and News Avoidance on Social Media. Social Media + Society, July-September 2019, 1-12. doi:https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119872956
Schmitt, J. B., Debbelt, C. A., & M.Scheider, F. (2018). Too much information? Predictors of information overload in the context of online news exposure. Information, Communication & Society, 21(8), 1151-1167. doi:https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2017.1305427