Are Fatigued Users Fleeing Social Media? A Three-Level Meta-Analysis on the Association Between Social Media Fatigue and Social Media Use

As users' psychological involvement with social media enters a bottleneck, social media fatigue (SMF) is silently growing. Numerous studies investigating the relationship between social media use and SMF have shown disparate results, leading to substantial uncertainty of SMF in relation to different types of social media use. To clarify this controversy, this study used the three-level meta-analytic method to quantitatively synthesize 121 studies with 213 effect sizes (N = 55,896). No significant publication bias was detected. Results showed that SMF was highly positively related to both discontinuous use (r = .46) and problematic use (r = .43), but negligibly related to general use (r = .09). Moderator analyses indicated that the age of the sample, assessment mode, and type of social media moderated the relationship between SMF and social media use. These findings suggest a widespread "SMF paradox" among social media users, in which they have a negative attitude toward social media but still rely heavily on it and do not significantly reduce the intensity of their use. Instead, they may tend to engage in passive use. We attempted to explain this phenomenon from the three-dimensional perspective of social media use.