Personal Versus Societal Risk: Examining Social Media Influence on Individual and Collective Behaviors for COVID-19 Containment

The study proposed a theoretical framework to identify the underlying mechanisms by which social media use affected individual and collective behaviors (i.e., self-protective and collective engagement behavior) during a public health emergency. The framework first considered how people shaped personal-level and societal-level risk perceptions from social media use and then examined how risk perception, in turn, predicted perceived media influence on themselves and on others, and subsequently individual and collective behaviors. The framework was tested with the survey data of 976 social media users during the 2022 COVID-19 outbreaks in China. The results showed that the indirect association between social media use and self-protective behaviors was mediated by risk perception, at both the personal and societal levels. The indirect association between social media use and collective engagement behaviors was mediated by societal-level risk perception and perceived media influence on others in sequence. However, no direct effect of social media use on collective engagement behaviors was found.