Information seeking behavior on Facebook: The role of censorship endorsement and personality

Facebook started as a platform intended for connecting people but it has developed into a rich information source. Based on the uses-and-gratification approach, we examined to what extent censorship endorsement and personality factors can explain information seeking behavior on Facebook. 1525 German-speaking Facebook users participated in a cross-sectional survey. Censorship endorsement, three personality traits (extraversion, neuroticism, and openness), age, and gender served as predictors in blockwise regression models. Participants' information seeking behavior on Facebook served as the criterion variable, whereby we examined different behavioral strategies. Overall, the extent of one's endorsement of censorship was positively and reliably related to different facets of information seeking. Apparently, censorship might be considered a protection measure to establish a decent communication and information space. In contrast, personality traits were inconsistently related to different facets of information seeking. Extraversion and neuroticism were positively related to information seeking in general, but their impact was absent on some subscales. The effects of age and gender differed from what has been found in previous studies. Overall, the results highlight the necessity of a more differentiated perspective on social media use, provide implications for uses-and-gratification research in the context of social media, and indicate interesting venues for future research by incorporating censorship attitude as a hitherto neglected factor.

Automated summary

The study examined German-speaking Facebook users' information seeking behavior and found a positive relationship between censorship endorsement and information seeking, while the impact of personality traits varied and age and gender had different effects.