Understanding College Students' News Sharing Experience on Instagram

Abstract

News sharing has become prevalent on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Recent empirical works suggest a growing trend that young adults are using Instagram to access and share news. In this work, I explore college students' news sharing experience on Instagram through an in-depth qualitative interview. The study prompts participants to reflect on their recently shared news pieces to understand news types that get circulated, as well as reasons behind the choice of using Instagram for sharing such content. Research results revealed: news that can help college students to (1) express their opinions, (2) raise awareness of their friends and (3) spark conversations are more likely to be shared on Instagram. The primary mode of sharing is via Instagram stories. Instagram is popular for news sharing because of its convenience of use, easiness of reaching out to peers, and the natural affordance of delivering powerful visual messages. Applying this work as an empirical basis, I propose features that can be added to Instagram to facilitate users' news reading and sharing experiences.