Exploring The Moderators of The Impact of Facebook Opinion Climate on Political Discussion Through Fear of Isolation

• Main Authors: Cheng-Wen Chang, 張政文
• Other Authors: Yue-Tan
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2018
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/3w5zdt

碩士 === 國立中山大學 === 行銷傳播管理研究所 === 106 === For the past few years, the extensive use of web 2.0 technology has led the rise of social media, resulting various political parties turned resources into social networking sites and attracted many scholars to invest how online opinions climate influence online and offline political participation. In abroad, related research is increasingly developing and improving, but relevant research used only special local issues, such as the United States surveillance program. At home, there are just few published research papers examining political participation on Facebook. Most of the above studies ignored the relevant influence of news media on social networking sites. In the light of this, this paper based on the theory of spiral of silence, explored the impact of the perceived opinion climate with Facebook friends and Facebook news on online and offline political participation. Using the fear of isolation as a mediator, target of opinion expression and internal political efficacy are tested as moderators to detect relevant moderated mediation effects. The result shows that perceived opinion climate with Facebook friends is positively related to online and offline political participation, but perceived opinion climate with Facebook news is only positively related to online political expression, not to offline political discussions. Fear of isolation can only partially mediate the relationship between perceived opinion climate with Facebook friends and news and political participation. Target of opinion expression and internal political efficacy did not have any impact on the relationship between perceived opinion climate with Facebook friends and news and political participation. This study attempted to investigate the spiral of silence theory in the new times of social media and yielded many interesting findings different from previous research. Detailed explanation and discussion of these research results are provided in the paper.