MOTIVATIONS BEHIND INSTANT NEWS SHARING: A USES AND GRATIFICATIONS THEORY PERSPECTIVE

Wan Hashridz Rizal Wan Abu Bakar, Abdul Rauf Ridzuan, Mohd Sufiean Hassan, Fahmi Zaidi Abd Razak

Abstract


This study applies Uses and Gratifications Theory to identify the psychological motives that drive Malaysians to share news instantly on social media. A cross-sectional survey of 370 Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp users was conducted and analysed with multiple regression. Results show that Pass Time (B = .232, p < .001), Information Sharing (B = .136, p = .090) and Socialization (B = .241, p < .001) significantly predict instant news sharing, jointly explaining 15.2 % of variance, whereas Information Seeking and Entertainment are negatively or non-significantly related. The findings indicate that idle moments and social bonding, rather than civic-oriented information needs, fuel rapid forwarding. For policymakers, the study suggests embedding friction-free verification cues and gamified accuracy badges into existing sharing flows to exploit the same gratifications that currently reward speed. Future research should incorporate additional psychological variables and adopt probability sampling to enhance explanatory power and generalisability.

Keywords


Instant news sharing; Uses and Gratifications Theory; social media; misinformation; Malaysia

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