What influences news learning and sharing on mobile platforms? An analysis of multi-level informational factors.

Abstract

PurposeThe purpose of the study is threefold: first, to identify what factors influence mobile users' willingness of news learning and sharing, second, to find out whether users' learning in the news platforms will affect their sharing behavior and third, to access the impact of sharing intention on actual sharing behavior on the mobile platform.Design/methodology/approachThis study proposes an influence mechanism model for examining the relationship among the factors, news learning and news sharing. The proposed mechanism includes factors at three levels: personal, interpersonal and social level. To achieve this, researchers collected data from 474 mobile news users in China to test the hypotheses. The tools SPSS 26.0 and AMOS 23.0 were used to analysis the reliability, validity, model fits and structural equation modeling (SEM), respectively.FindingsThe findings indicate that news learning on the mobile platforms is affected by self-efficacy and self-enhancement. And news sharing intention is influenced by self-efficacy, interpersonal trust, interpersonal reciprocity, online community identity and social norms positively. News sharing intention has a significant effect on news sharing behavior, but news learning has an insignificant relationship with new sharing.Originality/valueThis study provides practical guidelines for mobile platform operators and news media managers by explicating the various factors of users' engagement on the news platforms. This paper also enriches the literature of news learning and news sharing on mobile by the integration of two theories: the social ecology theory and the interpersonal behavior theory.