Do I Stay or Do I Go? Motivations and Decision Making in Social Media Non-use and Reversion

This paper explores the ways in which users give up as well as revert back to using social media based on the analysis of qualitative data from 680 respondents to a survey (N=1072). By focusing on the motivations rather than any particular social media platform, we were able to uncover reasons for voluntary non-use and reversion when users have a choice of several social media platforms. Our findings provide an ecological view of social media non-use and reversion highlighting that 1) previous findings of social media non-use and reversion reported on a single social media platform (e.g. Facebook, Twitter) are seen across several other platforms too; 2) access to multiple social media platforms in itself readily leads to non-use of one platform in favor of the use of another for reasons such as lack of differentiation and/or richness of features, device constraints of storage/ memory space or operating system support, perceptions of fading popularity, and availability of “a new kid on the block;” 3) findings of non-use and reversion practices and motivations that were seemingly incongruent between previous studies of different or same social media platforms tend to coalesce when we take a wider look at the social media landscape. By adopting the theoretical lens of cognitive biases in decision-making we were able to explain why users quit but decide to revert to using again in the environment of various positive and negative experiences on a particular platform, and to reconcile the seemingly paradoxical reasons for social media non-use and reversion.