Excessive social media use during the rainstorm disaster: Exploring the effects of social media overload on anxiety

This paper studies the adverse effects and potential mechanisms of social media overload in a rainstorm environment. This paper takes the stressor-strain-outcome (SSO) as the theoretical basis to build a model, which mainly reflects social media overload (information overload, communication overload and social overload), social media fatigue and disaster anxiety. The partial least square structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) method was used to collect 547 valid samples for the study. The final results show that social media fatigue is caused by social media overload, while disaster anxiety is formed by social media fatigue. Social media fatigue partially mediates communication overload and disaster anxiety. This study advances the literature on social media adverse effects research and SSO and provides practical implications to social media users and risk management departments.