Abstract
Anonymity is an inherent attribute of the Internet. Depending on pseudonyms, cyber citizens can role play and present themselves by reconstructing a different identity. In order to satisfy the needs of anonymous self-expression, anonymous social applications have become popular worldwide. In this paper, we conduct a survey regarding user intention (UI) of “Soul”, which is a popular anonymous social media application in China, especially for the youth. For this purpose, we design an adapted technology acceptance model (TAM) consisting of seven influencing factors, i.e., perceived usefulness (PU), perceived ease of use (PEOU), perceived anonymity (PA), perceived privacy riskiness (PPR), subjective norms (SN), emotional attachments (EA) and perceived interactivity (PI). Both the measurement and structural models are tested via partial least squares structural equation model. The results show that PU, PEOU, PPR and PI have a significant relationship with UI. Therein, both SN and EA can impact PU, and meanwhile, the direct paths between PI → PEOU, PA → PPR also exist. Contrary to expectation, the effect of SN on UI is not directly significant. The proposed model is able to explain 64.1% of variance for UI among Soul users. The results suggest that the proposed constructs provide relatively good explanations for the continuous intention to use the Soul app.
Highlights
Nowadays, depending on the explosive developments of Information and Communications Technology (ICT), the use of social media and its applications has become the trend around the world, which dramatically alters content distribution
According to the thresholds of f 2 in [118], we find that emotional attachments (EA), perceived ease of use (PEOU), perceived interactivity (PI) and perceived usefulness (PU) have a medium effect size ( f 2 > 0.15) on User Intention (UI)
The findings indicate that the main part of the model and hypotheses we developed are supported by the results
Summary
Nowadays, depending on the explosive developments of Information and Communications Technology (ICT), the use of social media and its applications has become the trend around the world, which dramatically alters content distribution. Social media is a representative product in Web 2.0, which combines the functions of decentralized open network models and cognition social models [1]. The advantages of social media can be described as participation, openness, communication, dialogue, community and connectivity [2,3,4,5]. The number of global social media users has dramatically increased from 2.21 billion in 2015 to 4.20 billion in 2021. The average time spent on social media reach 145 minutes per day [6]. Users can create diverse social identities in different social spaces by uploading their profiles [7]
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary 
Published Version (
Free)
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call