How do social media affect people’s compassion and civic action? The case of the Sewol Ferry disaster in Korea

Abstract

The purposes of the current study were to examine the effects of social media use on facilitating compassion and civic actions regarding the Sewol Ferry disaster in Korea and mitigating compassion fatigue compared with the uses of traditional media, and to investigate whether the link between compassion (and compassion fatigue) and civic action would be moderated by social media use. With online survey data (n = 717) collected in 2017, we found that (1) social media users experienced less compassion fatigue than other media users for news about the disaster: (2) there was no difference in compassion among the different media use groups; and (3) social media users were more likely to participate in disaster-related civic actions than were network TV users and newspaper users; (4) we did not find a moderation effect of social media use between compassion (and compassion fatigue) and civic actions.