2025 Theses Doctoral

Toward an Ontology of Social Media Silence: Threatened Psychological Needs and the Choice Not to Reshare News

Tran, Duyen Phuong

Despite the democratizing rhetoric surrounding social media, participation on these platforms remains highly unequal. Most users consume content silently, while only a relative minority contributes publicly and visibly. Existing research into digital participation largely fixates on active users and their motivations for engagement, neglecting the majority who abstain and the conditions that, in turn, suppress their participation. This work addresses that gap and specifically hones in on the behavior of news resharing — a low-effort, accessible practice that nonetheless holds civic significance. Studies that have in some way examined inhibiting factors in online peer news circulation are limited in number, suffer from methodological shortcomings, and lack theoretical grounding. Here, I propose an inversion of Uses and Gratifications Theory (UGT) to reconceptualize disengagement not simply as apathy or individual disposition but as a choice made when users expect news resharing to leave certain psychological needs unmet or threatened.

A mixed-methods online survey of 794 US users of Facebook and Twitter combined quantitative measures of psychological-need-based barriers and demographic factors with qualitative reflections on non-resharing. Descriptive statistics, correlation analyses, and group comparisons mapped the news resharing landscape across both platforms. Results showed that 44% of Twitter users and 50% of Facebook users never reshare news. On Twitter, politically moderate users were significantly more likely to abstain than those at the ideological extremes (on both the left and right) — a pattern that likely influences the site’s opinion climate. Across both platforms, doubts about a news post’s accuracy were the most common deterrent, followed by concerns about audience relevance on Facebook and public association with certain topics on Twitter. Thematic analysis of users’ open-ended responses further illustrated how these varied barriers are experienced in practice.

Prospective platform interventions are proposed to engage non-resharers. This work positions social media silence not as a void but as a substantive condition with structure, meaning, causes, and potential. In this vein, non-resharing is viewed as an outcome of interpersonal and infrastructural deterrents that can be both analyzed and addressed in order to foster broader participation in online public news discourse.