Social Media News Use And The Perception Of Sino-US Trade Friction

The "Sino-US trade war" refers to a series of trade sanctions against each other taken by United States and China since January 2018.The news go viral in 2018,especially on social media platform,an important channel for people to understand news events and gain knowledge from.This study focused on the knowledge of social media users from news.By conducting this study,we can understand the using and learning habits of social media users and make suggestions to the journalists and media agency in spreading the knowledge.Based on Cognitive Mediation Model,this study issued 300 questionnaires online to explore how social media users can gain knowledge from trade war news by analyzing their motivations,social media use behavior,age,education,channels and other in October 2018.This study uses the quantitative analysis to portray the user's knowledge level.This study found out that the user's factual knowledge level is generally low,but the overall structural knowledge is high.The Social Media users generally hold a negative attitude toward Sino-US trade war.This study partially confirms the impact of motivations on social media use behavior and political knowledge respectively.In terms of social media use behavior,users who hold "for work" motivations were more likely to " comment”and discuss news,users who hold “social utility”motivation tend to share news,users who hold“academic research needs”are more likely to discuss." Survelliance gratifications ",” for work " motivation contribute to the level of factual knowledge.Only "inadvertent exposure ","patriotic sentiment" are related to structural knowledge.In addition,the number of channels from which users get informed have a positive impact on the structural knowledge,and structural knowledge has a positive impact on the ambivalence.But there is no correlation between channels and ambivalence.Finally,this paper presents the shortcomings of the study,and suggest the future improvements in this area.