The impact of social media overload on the discontinuation of its use and on information avoidance

This thesis explores the impact of social media overload on information avoidance and discontinuation of social media use. Three dimensions of social media overload were adopted: information overload, social overload, and system feature overload. The stress-strain-outcome model is used to hypothesize that these three overload factors affect the strain factor (social media exhaustion). In turn, social media exhaustion causes both information avoidance and discontinuance of the use of social media. The existence of a relationship between information avoidance and discontinuance of social media use is also hypothesized. To test the proposed model, data from 125 social media users were collected and analysed using SmartPLS 3.0 software. The analysis results show that information overload and social overload positively affect social media exhaustion. System feature overload had no effect on social media exhaustion. Social media exhaustion had positive effects on both information avoidance and discontinued use of social media. The relationship between information avoidance and discontinuance of use was non-significant