Push, Overload, and Exhaustion: Reactions of Chinese College Students to Information About International News Events on Social Media

Effects of Information Overload on Social Media

Information overload is one such negative aspect. Previous studies have concluded that the “information overload” phenomenon exists as a product of the information content inherent on the social media platform, the “features” of that platform and informative system, and social aspects—and that overloading information will lead to discontinuing of use (Fu et al., 2020; Zhang et al., 2016). Deceptive information has a growing impact on society through all kinds of social media (Zimmer et al., 2019). But Bright et al. (2015) found that “social media helpfulness”—that is, the likelihood that a platform would provide helpful or instructive information—was also correlated with fatigue emotions among users. On X (formerly Twitter), more than a third of users have been found to “ignore” some of the received information: When users feel information overload, they engage a selective attention, ignoring some tweets (Sasaki et al., 2016). Information overload is both emotional and cognitive (Belabbes et al., 2023). For adolescents, without follow-up and guidance from school and their families, social media can have negative effects on social identity (Elsayed, 2021), academic performance (Du & Wang, 2024; Sun et al., 2023), and deleterious mental health outcomes (Wang et al., 2024a). It is thus important that young people are afforded the opportunity to learn effective social media use and how and where to direct their attention online.