By liking, sharing, tweeting, or retweeting, social media have provided users with many tools to share news content with their peers, write Veronika Karnowski, of LMU Munich, Larissa Leonhard, of University of Leipzig and Anna Sophie Kümpel, of LMU Munich.

The study explores the effects of motives, attitude, and intention on news-sharing behavior among German social media users. Data for the study were collected through an online survey among social media users who subscribed to the Twitter or Facebook pages of German news outlet Süddeutsche Zeitung.

The authors state that news-sharing attitude and subjective norms have a positive effect on news-sharing intention, which in turn has a positive effect on actual news-sharing behavior. The authors also argue that information seeking and socializing seem to be rather universal media use motivations.

The article “Why Users Share the News: A Theory of Reasoned Action-Based Study on the Antecedents of NewsSharing Behavior” was published by Communication Research Reports. It is available here.

Picture: The (social) media by Lies Vercaemere, licence: CC BY 2.0