The Effect of Anxiety and Anti-Social Content on Social Media Use: An Abstract

Abstract

Even though social media content is as varied as the viewing selection in a movie theater, current research has provided attention to prosocial positive content and its effects. However, negative antisocial content also exists in the Internet. We propose a model of social media use based on different sources of anxiety, including face-to-face social interaction, social media anxiety, and exposure to aggressive and non-aggressive cyber content. An interesting aspect of this study is that the sample is not limited to young students or young adults. Our results indicate that socially anxious individuals participate more actively in social media, possibly to alleviate anxiety. In addition, aggressive and non-aggressive antisocial content have a significant negative effect on social media use. The highlights of this study’s findings are summarized in the following key points. First, the results show that social anxious individuals participate more actively in social media, possibly to alleviate anxiety according to them. The social interaction anxiety construct assesses fears of all face-to-face social interactions. Mattick and Clarke (1998, p. 457) define social interaction anxiety as the “distress when meeting and talking with other people, be those people, members of the opposite sex, strangers, or friends. Social anxiety is defined as a “heightened self-consciousness characterized by a fear of humiliation and/or negative evaluation by others in social settings” (Levitan 2017, p. 80). Extending this definition to the social media setting, we assume social media anxiety may result from fears of humiliation and/or negative evaluations by other social media users. Antisocial behavior are acts that run contrary to society, and its norms of conduct that promote interaction and wellbeing also known as prosocial norms. Antisocial cyber content is classified into two categories: aggressive antisocial cyber content and non-aggressive antisocial cyber content, as is supported in the literature (Hamer et al. 2017; Vitaro et al. 2015). Accordingly, aggressive antisocial behaviors may encompass expressions of violence whereas non-aggressive behaviors may include actions that break rules or social norms. This distinction has been useful to explain specific emotional responses. The findings reveal that aggressive antisocial content has a negative effect on social media use. In addition, it was found that nonaggressive antisocial content has a negative effect on social media use.