Government policies and attitudes to social media use among users in Turkey: The role of awareness of policies, political involvement, online trust, and party identification

Zagidullin M. Aziz N. Kozhakhmet S.
November 2021 Elsevier Ltd

Technology in Society
2021 #67

Few research studies have examined the impact of government policies toward social media on individuals’ attitudes to social media use, particularly when these policies aim to denounce and control social media platforms, as was the case in Turkey in 2013–2016. A conceptual model, based on the Theory of Planned Behavior (Ajzen, 2005) [1], was proposed to investigate the mediating role of awareness of government policies, degree of political involvement, online trust, and the moderating role of party identification in predicting the attitudes to social media use. Data were collected through a survey of 653 social media users in Istanbul, Turkey (mean age = 31.76, SD = 10.96; 40 % women, 83 % Turkish ethnicity) in September 2015. Using PLS-SEM modelling, the awareness of government policies, the degree of political involvement, and the online trust were found to partially mediate the relationship between the frequency of social media use and the attitudes to social media use for the users of Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram, while the moderating role of party identification was not significant in this model. The results provide additional support for the role of social context and past behaviors in predicting the attitudes and future intentions in the use of digital communication technologies.

Attitudes to social media use , Government policy , Online trust , Political involvement , Theory of Planned Behavior , Turkey

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School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences, University of Reading Malaysia, Malaysia
School of Business and Economics, Westminster International University in Tashkent, Uzbekistan
Business School, Suleyman Demirel University, Kazakhstan

School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences
School of Business and Economics
Business School

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