Content area
Full text
1. Introduction
Social media (e.g. Twitter, Facebook or WeChat) has been deeply embedded in people's daily lives. Users are increasingly inclined to cultivate their virtual social life on a social media platform. Recent data in wearesocial.com (Kemp, 2017), as of January 2017, reflected more than 2.8 billion people who can be marked as active social media users. Furthermore, they spend approximately 2.5 h using social media per day. Social media creates functional building blocks for users to update their online status and enable them to share videos, photos and communicate conveniently with an acquaintance. Thus, they develop interest on using social media while working, dining with family and even walking on the road (Kwon et al., 2016). Kwon et al. (2016) noted that the problematic use of online social networks (OSNs) has taken up the majority of the total population of users. Social media users spend many hours communicating with an acquaintance and reading new posts while ignoring the negative consequences of problematic usage (Dhir et al., 2018). Moreover, the excessive use of social media could bring psychological, social and work difficulties to users such as reduced productivity, increased work pressure (Yu et al., 2018) and induced personal and family conflicts of user (Zheng and Lee, 2016). Hence, identifying the factors that lead to social media addiction and the approaches to control these problematic usage behaviors is essential.
Despite the current prevalence of information technology (IT) overuse problem, studies focusing on the negative outcomes of social media usage are limited until recent years (Yu et al., 2018). However, research on social media addiction remains far from adequate. Few studies have explored the formation mechanism of social media addiction. In the existing related literature, Zheng and Lee (2016) noted that excessive use of social media could bring work, personal and family conflicts. Wang et al. (2015) showed that negative anticipation effect and lack of self-regulation may play key roles in explaining microblog dependence. Gao et al. (2017) showed that factors such as escapism and enjoyment could lead to users' social networking site (SNS) addiction. Nevertheless, among the countable information system (IS) studies on the dark side of social media, they focus on how users' subjective feelings and perceived value lead to...